Kubernetes in 2025: When You Need It and When You Don't

The Kubernetes Complexity Cost

A minimal production-ready Kubernetes cluster requires expertise in: container runtime, networking, storage, secrets management, RBAC, ingress controllers, cluster autoscaling, and monitoring. For a team of 5 engineers building a SaaS product, this is a significant distraction. Before committing to K8s, make sure your CI/CD pipeline is solid — a good pipeline is table stakes before adding orchestration complexity.

Modern Alternatives Worth Considering

AWS App Runner, Google Cloud Run, and Railway eliminate infrastructure management entirely. For most SaaS products handling up to ~100k users, these managed platforms cost less in engineer time than self-managed Kubernetes.

When Kubernetes Makes Sense

Kubernetes is genuinely worth the investment when: you have dedicated platform/SRE engineers, you need fine-grained resource scheduling, you require multi-cloud portability, or you're running batch workloads that benefit from advanced scheduling. See how we applied this thinking in our SaaS cloud cost reduction case study where the right infrastructure choice saved a client $360K/year.

The Managed Kubernetes Middle Ground

EKS, GKE, and AKS eliminate control plane management but still require node pool management and cluster upgrades. They're appropriate for teams with cloud-native experience that need Kubernetes features. Regardless of platform, codify everything with Infrastructure as Code from day one.

FBG's Framework

For clients under $10M ARR, we almost always recommend starting with managed serverless platforms. To discuss the right infrastructure strategy for your stage, book a free strategy call.