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Kubernetes for Solo Founders: Worth It or Overkill?

Kubernetes isn’t overkill for solo founders. Thinking you need a full team to run it is the real overkill.

November 16, 2025

Written by Leo Annette

Moving to K8s was a choice motivated primarily by the admin pain of having to babysit servers in the early hours of the morning.

While some may say that K8s is hard (and it can be), I would definitely say that it is easier than being a solo on-call engineer at midnight.

TL;DR for the Short Attention Span Brain

• Solo founders, K8s is worth it.

• It’s not just about the ability to scale.

• It’s about the ability to be reliable, repeatable, automated, and about having a peace of mind.

• You're not using K8s the way the big companies do (with 12+ DevOps engineers).

• You're using it for set-and-forget infrastructure.

• Predictable behaviour is important, there's no need for magic.

• Trust, automation, and predictability are the most important.

• Don’t pick K8s if you’re not the one managing it.

What it is and why it exists

At its core, K8s is an open-source, scalable, containerized application management system. It is a “universal” application layer that determines where your apps will run, how they will be recovered, and when they will scale, all in an automated fashion.

Where Google’s Search, Gmail, YouTube, and other apps ran on google's internal system called Borg.

Kubernetes is the public, simplified version of Borg.

The Reality: You Don’t Have Time to Babysit Infra

Your life as a solo founder or as a team of 2 to 3 is as follows:

• Writing the backend
• Shipping the frontend
• Handling SEO and the marketing
• Integrating payments
• Responding to support emails
• Doing the accounting, legal, and hiring
• Fixing whatever broke today

For me, its over 4,500 commits to an accounting SaaS, a dog that has to be walked, and a gym routine. There is no room left for, "Oh, the server is full again, time to SSH and clean logs."

Infra choices aren’t whether you can run Nginx on a $5 VPS.

It’s whether you want infra to be one more spinning plate in an already overloaded schedule.

The real question becomes:

What lets me forget about infrastructure for the longest time while still trusting it with real customers?

For me, that answer was Kubernetes.

The Slow Death of “Simple” MVP Infrastructure

My road to Kubernetes didn’t start with “I want containers.”

It started with what everyone calls the simple setup.

Phase 1 — Tiny VM Era

• A single EC2

• One API

• Managed database

• Reverse proxy, PM2/systemd to keep things alive

Phase 2 — Growing Pains

• More VMs

• Load balancer

• VPC

• NAT gateway

• Security groups

Still “simple”… until it isn’t.

Phase 3 — “We Need Staging”

You responsibly want to test on a separate environment before deploying.

So you duplicate everything:

• New VPC

• New NAT

• New subnets

• New load balancer

• New API

• New database

Now your infra bill quietly doubles.

Phase 4 — New Services, New Chaos

You want to add:

• A marketing site

• A headless CMS

• Background jobs

• Cron jobs

Your infra surface explodes.

Phase 5 — Redis, the Final Straw

You add Redis.

Now you have all of the following:

• API

• DB

• Redis

• CMS

• Marketing site

• Staging copies of everything

The servers have frozen and stopped working with strange errors for a few minutes.

You just restart the servers and hope it doesn't happen again.

I went from:

"I am building a product"

to

"I am a part time sysadmin with a SaaS on the side."

The Break Point:

I Needed Predictability, Not "Simplicity"

K8s Is Too Complex! I will just keep it simple

Is what I thought to myself. I then thought to myself:

"Simple" then very quickly becomes fragile when you have:

• multiple services
• multiple environments
• background jobs
• a customer waiting for the actual product

People seem to forget that when it comes to complexity, it never disappears.

No... It just moves off to the side and becomes:

• manual SSH sessions

• hand managed processes

• ad hoc scripts

• snowflake servers

I did not move to K8s because I love YAML. I did it because I wanted to have

Predictable behavior

• It restarts when it crashes during your sleep.

• When deployed, it rolls out a safe deployment.

• Adding staging or other environments doesn't double the amount of thinking I have to do.

• Adding other services doesn't require reinventing the whole process.

I wanted infrastructure that resembled code and not like building a Jenga tower.

How I Actually Use Kubernetes as a Solo Founder

People think about FAANG for Kubernetes:

• Responding to dozens of microservices
• Observability teams
• SREs
• Custom operators
• 300 dashboards

What I Use

Managed GKE cluster (on Google Cloud)

I don’t run my control plane (I strongly believe that small teams should not run their own control plane).

1-2 namespaces

• production

• staging

A handful of services

• Backend API
• Frontend
• Marketing site
• CMS
• Redis / Postgres proxy

ArgoCD for GitOps
I push to Git, Argo syncs.

Autoscaling + Self-Healing
Pods restart. Nodes rotate. Workloads move.

CronJobs for background tasks

I don’t go to the Kubernetes dashboard most weeks.
That is the point.

Perceived Overkill vs Actual Simplicity

What People Think Kubernetes Is

• 80 microservices
• 12 DevOps engineers
• Helm hierarchies
• PagerDuty chaos

What Kubernetes Actually Is (For Solo Founders)

• 1-3 apps
• 1 namespace per environment
• Bitnami charts for Redis/Postgres
• Autoscaling
• ArgoCD syncing
• Few Ingress rules

You don’t need NASA to run three containers.

Kubernetes should just be thought of as A boring, reliable platform for a handful of important services.

Reasons Why it's Better to Use Kubernetes

Results: 365-Day Uptime Proof

(This is a screenshot of the uptime dashboard of my SaaS, Fortune.app. It has been running for 365 days with 99.99% uptime. This shows public services only - internal services like Redis and databases have also maintained 100% uptime.)

1. No More Surgery Infra Changes

When you add services, all you do is the following blocks:

Deployment + Service + Ingress. (and this is likely a copy paste from a previous service)

No manual VMs. No handshake with load balancers.

2. Boring Deployments

Merge a PR to main. CI/CD pipeline runs:

• build the new image.
• run some tests.
• if all is good, push to a container registry (like Google Artifact Registry).
• Then a little script that pull your gitops repo, and update the container tag in the kubernetes cluster.

Then ArgoCD applies updates to the cluster. Kubernetes does a rolling deployment for the new version. All done in less than 5 minutes.

3. Staging is No Longer Expansive

You can just create another namespace.

4. No More Service Chaos

You can have one orchestrator and keep a single mental construct of "everything is a pod."

5. No More Random Crashing

When nodes restart, pods can get rescheduled. You can stop being hostage to a single troublesome EC2 instance.

Reasons Why Kubernetes is Not Worth It

Kubernetes is not for you if:

• You don't automate CI/CD
• You don't plan to run Multiple services
• You don't know containers
• We're building a simple CRUD app
• You ship slowly
• You have never used Docker seriously

And tbh, if you dont like YAML, you probably dont like Kubernetes.

A PaaS is your best bet. Kubernetes can be great once you have a infrastructure bottleneck.

Why I Didn’t Go All In on PaaS

These days, several platforms have high-quality offerings. Vercel, Netlify, Render, Railway, Fly.io.

But given the strict infrastructure demands present in my case (accounting SaaS), I had the following concerns:

• Vercel/Netlify: Frontend is fantastic, but at that time, I could not rely on them for long-running backend workers.

• Render/Railway: Excellent user experience, but way too much vendor lock-in.

• EC2/VPS: had to revert to manual upgrades, firewalls, daemons, scripts, SSL hell

Kubernetes granted me:

• More control than PaaS.

• More predictability than VMs.

• And the Google Cloud credits were useful (2 years of credits on GCP, that sealed the deal).

The Cloud-Agnostic Superpower Nobody Talks About

Kubernetes isnt tied to any cloud.

It's operable in/on:

• AWS

• GCP

• Azure

• Bare metal

• Virtual Machines

• Local clusters

• Raspberry Pi

It's the closest thing to production-ready infrastructure that doesn’t lock you in.

Terraform + Kubernetes = Infinite Infrastructure With One Command
With the help of Terraform, one can:

• Get/ create a cluster

• Introduce/ Install ArgoCD

• Introduce/ Install Ingress NGINX

• Introduce/ Install External Secrets

• Introduce/ Install Cert- Manager

• Connect/ Wire everything together

• Allow/ Let Argo sync the remaining parts from Git

Your entire infrastructure is reproducible, consistent, automated.
That’s what really sold me.
Not the technology, but the predictability.

The Ultimate Truth: Restful Mind
As a one-person founder, your energy is a valuable resource.

Kubernetes gives me:

• The freedom from babysitting infrastructure

• The freedom to ship confidently

• The freedom to focus on the product, customers, user experience, SEO

• The freedom to rest without worrying about zombie processes

It's not really about scale.

It's truly about peace of mind.

The Most Challenging Components Are These: The First Time You Go Through

In Kubernetes, there's a first time for everything:

• First run of a cluster

• First Ingress setup

• First ArgoCD bootstrap

• First engagement with a CRD

• First pseudo-code of YAML

• First run of a pod with a testing issue that requires debugging.

But it is rather convenient that these are a one time thing. The rest are just repetitions and copy paste.

• Is it a new SaaS? No worries, it's the same playbook.

• Is it a new worker? No worries, it's the same YAML.

• Is it a new Redis? No worries, it's the same chart.

• Is it a new marketing site? No worries, it's the same manifests.

It's the blessing of writing code once and reusing it forever. (It's been a while since I made that setup, but it still works whitout any issues in the last 3 years.)

The No-BS Learning Path

1. For a start, go small and local

   use minikube, k3d, or kind.

   Learn about Services, Ingress, and Deployments.

2. Add ArgoCD + Kustomize and GitOps early

   No need to worry about manual infra.

3. Install Ingress-NGINX

   This way, there won't be any need for specific load balancers to the cloud. This is also what give you cloud agnostic infra.

4. Use Cert-Manager

   Saves a free Let’s Encrypt SSL for life.

5. Use External Secrets Operator

   Utilize secret managers for GCP, AWS, or Azure.
   Instead of .env files.

6. Incorporate Grafana with Prometheus

   For CPU, memory, pod restarts health of the cluster and RPS.

7. Get to know the Security Model rapidly

   Such as, RBAC, Service Accounts, and the rest.

Once you've gone through it once, everything else is just a mere repetition of muscle memory.

My Advice for Solopreneur Founders

Use Kubernetes in case:

1. You are building on something quite ambitious

2. You have an understanding of Docker and Git

3. You anticipate having several servies

4. You desire long-term infra stability

Another tool, other than Kubernetes, is advisable in case:

1. You are in the early stages of your product development, i.e. learning on how to ship your product.

2. You currently have only a single backend

3. You really dont like YAML

4. Infrastructure as code seems to overwhelm you

In case you are looking to save your time immediately, you are better off remaining without Kubernetes.

In case you're looking to save time in the long run, adjacently, for the next three years, you should really start considering using Kubernetes.

FAQ: Small Teams and Solopreneurs Kubernetes

Is Kubernetes too much for a solo founder to use?

No, as long as it is being used correctly. Kubernetes is overkill if you are trying to implement it the same way big, established companies do-- trying to have 80 microservices, custom operators, several SRE teams, etc. For solo founders, it ends up being a set and forget platform, as it scales, restarts, deploys and maintains reliability.

How should Kubernetes be learned best?

For the most part, students should begin using it with the tools kind, minikube, or k3d in order to learn how to build Deployments, Services, and Ingress as a start. Once they obtain mastery of that, they can move on to adopting GitOps that uses ArgoCD + Kustomize, as it is a way to learn Kubernetes without problems in building something in a dirty, messy, unreproducible way. They should also trying to avoid cloud-specific features for the time being.

Does Kubernetes reduce infrastructure costs for small teams?

The absence of Kubernetes does not reduce raw cloud costs, however, operational costs and time spent by a founder is significantly reduced. Less time is consumed debugging servers, recreating environments and battling with load balancers. If cloud credits like GCP are used, costs become even less.

Can I run Kubernetes on AWS, GCP, or Azure?

Absolutely. Kubernetes is completely cloud agnostic. It is possible to run it on:

• AWS (EKS)
• GCP (GKE)
• Azure (AKS)
• Bare metal
• A single VM
• A Raspberry Pi cluster

This decreases the risk of vendor lock-in and provides portable infrastructure.

When should I avoid using Kubernetes?

You should avoid Kubernetes if

• You only have one backend service
• You don't have Docker
• You are not comfortable with CI/CD
• You have issues with YAML or configuration-as-code
• You want to ship an MVP as soon as possible

In these situations, a PaaS like Vercel, Netlify, or Render is a better choice.

Why Kubernetes is Considered Difficult

Kubernetes doesn't deal with difficulties concerning features like custom resource definitions (CRDs) and operators, as well as service meshes, Helm, and multi-cluster configurations/helm complexities, since developers only make use of what they need. Solo founders would only make use of a small fraction concerning this ecosystem, which includes, Deployments, Services, Ingress, ArgoCD, and autoscaling.

What Kubernetes Benefits Solo Founders?

Kubernetes provides the following advantages, which aids solo founders:

• Self healing pods along with a restart automation feature

• Steps of rolling updates in addition to safe rollbacks

• Staging environments that are reliable

• Deploy the backend, frontend, CMS, and workers in a unified manner

• ArgoCD enables gitOps workflows

• Consistency along with predictability as well as stability

Kubernetes provides the infrastructure anxiety in which they would need to focus on product development.

How Much Time Does One Need to Set Up Kubernetes for a New Project?

The answer to this is that the initial set up is the hardest. If one is learning from the very beginning, it can go from a couple of days to a week. However, once one builds their baseline with a couple of features, such as cluster creation, ArgoCD bootstrap, NGINX ingress, External Secrets and Cert-Manager, for each new project, one would be able to use their scripts over and over.

What are the main differences between Kubernetes and Docker?

Docker containers and Kubernetes is the program that does most administrative work like operating, managing, adjusting, and recovering the containers. Kubernetes manages the containers and Docker is the container. Eventually, all large applications that implement Docker require something like Kubernetes.

Is Kubernetes helpful for multi service SaaS applications?

Yes, Kubernetes excels with these types of applications. If your SaaS is made up of an:

• API

• Website

• Marketing Website

• CMS

• Worker services

• Schedulers

This small patch of services can be deployed over one complete service sample of the Kubernetes services.

Can Kubernetes help with service availability and downtime?

Yes. There are a number of reasons for the reduction in downtime with automated services:

• Roll updating

• Failure recovery with automated container restarts.

• Node scheduling

• Health verification

• Pods maintaining the change in work available.

Do you need DevOps experience in order to work with kubernetes?

With Kubernetes, you need a working understanding of:

• Docker

• YAML/configuration files

• Git usage

• CI/CD

In order to work with Kubernetes, no SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) and no DevOps advance skills are required, as the most challenging aspects of the work flow are covere, are with managed service like Google Kubernetes Engine in Google Cloud Services.

What tools should I install first when learning Kubernetes?

You should install the following tools:

• kind/minikube/k3d (for local testing)

• ArgoCD (for GitOps)

• Kustomize (for clean configuration overlays)

• ingress nginx (for universal)

• cert-manager (for auto-ssl)

• external secrets operator (for cloud secret syncing)

• Grafana + Prometheus (for observability)

Since this stack can work on any cloud, it is good for any project as well.

Is Kubernetes good for long-term scalability?

Definitely, because Kubernetes was meant for long-term scaling, starting with a single node, then scaling vertically or horizontally. It is one of the safest infra options for the future.

Is it portable between projects?

Definitely. We can reuse the same Kubernetes + Terraform + ArgoCD bootstrap for every new project once the baseline setup is built. That turns infra into reusable code instead of a burden for each project.