So kubernetes has been around for more than gen years now and the argument doesn’t look at way to “just doing the bare minimum” and get the best of both worlds as long as you’re okay with spending a bit more.

Dumb idea: launch an eks cluster ok aws (managed control plane, little to no mgmt time + painless upgrade) and just create a nodegroup with one node.

You get all the benefits of kubernetes and you can upgrade the underlying machine with no downtime (add a new node to the node group, drain the old node, delete old node)