K8s can allow you to build a reliable and mostly self sufficient suite of tools for your home lab. There is a lot of upfront cost to get there. However, I’d argue k8s isn’t actually all that more complex than running individual docker containers. In both cases you need to have an understanding of networking, containers, proxies, databases, and declarative config of some form or another. K8s just provides primitives that make it really easy to build more complex container projects up declaratively. It doesn’t mean it has to be complex. I run 5 or 6 different services with individual backing Postgres DBs. I source the containers from docker hub just like you would in docker. Certbot will auto deploy certs for any service I set up this way. HA proxy will auto add domains and upstreams for them too. When I want to setup a new service I often just copy and paste an existing service manifest and do a find and replace with a new service name. At that point I can usually just apply the manifest and wait 5 min. My service will be up, available on the internet, and already have SSL certs.
I’ll add, if you have really complex projects with tons of micro services you can deploy a helm chart for that in two commands. Even with minimal or no knowledge about how it should be setup.
I disagree. You can deploy nearly anything from docker hub or some other container registry in k8s with little to no trouble. Can you give some examples?