Infrastructure Decisions · judgement tool

Do I need Kubernetes?

Do I need Kubernetes? Answer a few real conditions and get a Not yet / Probably yes / Yes-priority verdict — every factor tagged official fact, calculation, StackSays rule or estimate. No fabricated industry threshold.

A judgement tool, not a tool ranking · thresholds are StackSays rules, not industry standards · official facts verified 2026-07-17 · share the URL to share your answers

How to read this: every factor below is tagged by where it comes from — official fact official/documented · calculation math on your inputs · StackSays rule our decision logic · StackSays estimate our judgement. The verdict cut-points are StackSays rules, not an industry threshold — there is no universal traffic number for these decisions.

Your situation

The recommendation updates as you answer. Share the URL to share it.

Many long-running servicesseveral always-on services, not one appNeed custom orchestrationsidecars, DaemonSets, custom schedulers, operatorsMulti-cloud / portability requirementmust run the same way across clouds/on-premHave ops/platform capacitysomeone owns clusters, upgrades, securityA PaaS/containers could serve todayRailway/Render/Fly/ECS would cover current needs

Recommendation

Not yet

Based on the factors you set — 0 pushing toward adopting, 3 against.

Why it might be premature

-14 PaaS would do — If a managed PaaS/containers would serve today, k8s is likely premature — start there (our judgement)StackSays estimate
-12 Ops capacity — Without ops capacity, a cluster's upgrade/security burden usually outweighs its benefit (our judgement)StackSays estimate
-10 Many services — A single app or a handful of services rarely needs a clusterStackSays rule

When to reassess

Revisit when you genuinely run many services, need custom orchestration, or gain a team to own clusters — not because k8s is the default.

Minimal implementation

Run containers on a managed PaaS (Railway/Render/Fly) or a managed container service (ECS/Cloud Run) first; adopt managed k8s (EKS/GKE) only when the needs above are real.

Risk of not doing it

For the wrong stage: none — you avoid a large ops surface. For the right stage: manual orchestration and scaling toil.

Cost & complexity once adopted

High: clusters, upgrades, RBAC, networking, security patching. Managed control planes reduce but don't remove it.

This is a judgement tool, not a leaderboard. The StackSays rule and StackSays estimate factors are StackSays logic and opinion; the official fact factors link to official sources below. No industry-standard threshold is implied — the answer is driven by the conditions you set.

Official facts cited

Source	Verified
Kubernetes overview (official)	2026-07-18
Cloud Run — managed containers without k8s (official)	2026-07-18

Only the factors tagged “official fact” rest on these sources; rules and estimates are StackSays logic and are labeled as such.

Next decision

Which hosting should I use? →Do I need a load balancer? →