> And it's managed.

Can’t use cloud stuff on-prem and also if your clients have a server room of their own. Same for homelab.

Also it’s nice not to shift the pets attitude from servers to clusters and instead treat everything as cattle - provided you have backups of persistent data and the config versioned in a Git repo and there’s maybe some Ansible in the mix, being able to recreate an environment in the case of a fuckup is nice and also helps against bit rot.

Disclaimer: I actually prefer Docker Swarm/Compose over K8s due to simplicity (which matches my deployments and scale), but in the cases where I had to use a variety of K8s, going for K3s was pretty okay.

Because they are selling a “pro” version as part of their commercial product SlicerVM. It has more features for operating a k3s cluster.

I implemented a system that included the OP functionality (plus a whole lot more.) It was for on-premise deployment at customers. It can also be used to spin up stand-alone instances of our system in the cloud, for development, testing, etc. While you could, in theory, do many deployments on a single k8s cluster, there are some benefits to the automatic isolation you get from deploying on a standalone VM.

You're cool if you manage your own K8S cluster.

It's applied big brain memetics. k8s turned pet servers into cattle. People then do the next step and want to treat their clusters as cattle as well. Also it has a bit of the "can it run DOOM" vibe to treat whole k8s clusters like this.