I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted unless people are afraid that you're sponsored by Google. Your experience aligns with mine. Running a SaaS app by myself that serves heavy loads around 1 rps with burst of 400+ rps, k8s works really great for my use case.
But I grant you, it has been a very complex, painful journey to get this working right, and in fact I'm still making tweaks and adjustments. Plus, often times it's really unclear if I should scale vertically or horizontally.
"k8s works really great for my use case. [..] But I grant you, it has been a very complex, painful journey to get this working right, and in fact I'm still making tweaks and adjustments."
TBO, it does not sound like it's working great for your use-case =) Wouldn't something like Cloud Run, AppEgine Standard or Heroku be much simpler and cheaper? Or just a single $5-15 per month* VM?
* depending on how much oomph you need for those 400 rps
But I grant you, it has been a very complex, painful journey to get this working right, and in fact I'm still making tweaks and adjustments. Plus, often times it's really unclear if I should scale vertically or horizontally.