As a small nonprofit with a tech team consisting of mostly volunteers, a few interns, and a small % of our paid staff time, this was a big concern for us.
Things are always fine when you're starting, but if you don't understand the system it's hard to troubleshoot when it breaks. Understanding Kubernetes is hard. Obviously there are ways to outsource cluster management, but we don't have the budget of a VC funded startup.
We ended up choosing Hashicorp's products -- Nomad for orchestration, Consul for service discovery, and Vault for secret management. Each one is just a binary with a <20 line config file, and it takes ~two days to read and understand the docs well enough that we have been able to troubleshoot issues quickly.
Things are always fine when you're starting, but if you don't understand the system it's hard to troubleshoot when it breaks. Understanding Kubernetes is hard. Obviously there are ways to outsource cluster management, but we don't have the budget of a VC funded startup.
We ended up choosing Hashicorp's products -- Nomad for orchestration, Consul for service discovery, and Vault for secret management. Each one is just a binary with a <20 line config file, and it takes ~two days to read and understand the docs well enough that we have been able to troubleshoot issues quickly.