K8s is nice even without microservices. Yeah you don't get nearly the benefits you would in a microservice architecture, but I consider it a control plane for the infrastructure, with an active ecosystem and focus on ergonomics. If you have a really simple infrastructure, you will still need to script spinning up the VMs, setting up the load balancing, etc. but K8s gives you a homogenous layer upon which to put your containers. It's not too much of an overkill, especially with a hosted K8s from e.g. Google, AWS, and soon Digital Ocean and Scaleway.
Things like throwing another node into the cluster, or rolling updates are free, which you would otherwise need to develop yourself. All of that is totally doable, of course, but I like being able to lean on tooling that is not custom, when possible.
When your infrastructure does need to become more complicated, you're already ready for it. Even if I were only serving a single language, starting with a K8s stack makes a lot of sense, to me, from a tooling perspective. Yeah normal VMs might be simpler, conceptually, but I don't consider K8s terribly complicated from a user perspective, when you're staying around the lanes they intend you to stay in. Part of this may also be my having worked with pretty poor ops teams in the past, but I think K8s gives you a really good baseline that gives pretty good defaults about a lot of your infrastructure, without a lot of investment on your part.
That said, if you're managing it on a bare metal server, then VMs may be much easier for you. K8s The Hard Way and similar guides go into how that would work, but managing high availability etcd servers and the like is a bit outside my comfort zone. YMMV.
Things like throwing another node into the cluster, or rolling updates are free, which you would otherwise need to develop yourself. All of that is totally doable, of course, but I like being able to lean on tooling that is not custom, when possible.
When your infrastructure does need to become more complicated, you're already ready for it. Even if I were only serving a single language, starting with a K8s stack makes a lot of sense, to me, from a tooling perspective. Yeah normal VMs might be simpler, conceptually, but I don't consider K8s terribly complicated from a user perspective, when you're staying around the lanes they intend you to stay in. Part of this may also be my having worked with pretty poor ops teams in the past, but I think K8s gives you a really good baseline that gives pretty good defaults about a lot of your infrastructure, without a lot of investment on your part.
That said, if you're managing it on a bare metal server, then VMs may be much easier for you. K8s The Hard Way and similar guides go into how that would work, but managing high availability etcd servers and the like is a bit outside my comfort zone. YMMV.