I see your point but you might need Kubernetes before going « Google scale ». Google is probably the biggest scale in the world, that would mean they’re the only one requiring Kubernetes, which they’re not.

A big advantage of Kubernetes is that it can help to harmonize the deployment process of numerous teams in a whole company. As long as your company has multiple teams, including a team dedicated to administrating the Kubernetes cluster(s), then it can be a good choice. Because at this point, the cheapest solution is not necessarily cheap anymore.

That’s NOT a problem in startups, even less in early stage startups though.