Unless you need horizontal scalability or clustering, Compose + Terraform is all you need.

With Compose, you get proper n-tier application containerization with immutability. By adding an infrastructure-as-code tool such as Terraform to abstract your IT environment, you can deploy your application on-premises, in the cloud, or at a customer site with a single command.

For clustering needs, there’s Incus, and finally, Kubernetes for very fast scalability (<mn), massive deployments on large clusters, cloud offloading, and microservices.

Almost nobody truly needs the complexity of Kubernetes. The ROI simply isn’t there for the majority of use cases.