My rule of thumb when working on side projects is to keep it simple:

- use tech-stacks that I know

- even simpler – use node.js / express (i.e. use only one programming language)

- Standard AWS EC2, S3, Postgres instances

- scale vertically before scaling horizontally

- use GitHub Actions as much as possible

- deploys and rollbacks are done manually

- I keep a list of useful CLI commands in Notion

If you're a small team you shouldn't need to think about kubernetes tbh.