How do you suggest companies which don't need binpacking run their workloads, and is it really that much simpler than using k8s?

If you need automated deployments, centralized logging, autoscaling, etc which many teams do, then you're going to be dealing with a bunch of complexity anyway.

Honestly, package a container and run it Serverless. AWS Fargate, GCP Cloud Run, and similar are better fits.

There will come a time when cost of paying the overhead for a devops person (and eventually) team is worth it. At that point, k8s can be a great fit.

In my experience, that tends to be when you're at scale enough to care about costs a lot. Total spend and/or reducing COGS make it worth while. But when you look at it from the time an engineer costs, it's easier to see.

Are you gonna save 200k/year (minimum) in costs moving to k8s? Then do it. If you don't have line of sight to that, pay AWS/GCP to manage that for you, and focus on your business.

Also note, there's stages even with running k8s. Don't go all in running it all.

Start with a container, run it serverless. When k8s becomes a better fit (to reduce costs, or with other small exceptions), use EKS or GKE. Don't run your own control plane.

If you really have a need for a lot of custom stuff, then start to run your own control plane. But by this team, you probably have a team managing all this. If that cost (remembering how expensive engineers are) is shocking, you should be running a different solution.

I'm not certain if this is what you meant, but optimizing cloud spending is one of our organizationally agreed upon goals.