My strategy involves building stateless apps with distributed services that have good support in Kubernetes like Yugabyte and Minio.

What I do is host the thing on a cheap cloud server until it grows enough to need HA or scaling. At that point I move my workloads into a cluster.

I already have everything patterned out though so, I’m living in some sunk costs if anything newer or truly better comes along.

Speaking off-the-cuff (so don't hold me to this):

If you need multi-node for (fairly good but not amazing) reliability, then the easiest first step would be a cloud instance, rather than bare-metal server. Given live migration, they are effectively multi-node.

If you need multi-node for performance, then get a single dedicated bare-metal server. They can pack a huge punch while being cost effective. And you'll likely get 100% uptime in a good year.

If you need multi-node for reliability & performance, then kubernetes.

[1] https://www.flightcontrol.dev/

It basically lets you keep the good parts of kubernetes, but not suffer any of the complexities

Use it at work, because we wanted the Heroku experience, without the prices.

https://olly.pagecord.com/migrating-the-pagecord-rails-app-f...

I have plenty of paying customers but I still think K8s would be complete overkill at this stage.