You have a lot of responses here, but I’ll tell what k8s actually is, since a lot of people seem to get this wrong.

Just like k8s, docker has many tools. Although docker is packaged in a way, that it looks like it’s just 1 tool. This is docker desktop. Under the hood there is docker engine that is really a runtime and image management service and API. You can look at this more if you wanted. There is containerd, runc, cri-o. These were all created so that different implementations can all talk to this API in a standard way and work.

Moving on to k8s. K8s is a way to scale these containers to run in different ways and scale horizontally. There are ways to even scale nodes vertically and horizontally to allow for more or less resources to place these containers on. This means k8s is very event driven and utilizes a lot of APIs to communicate and take action.

You said that you are doing kubectl apply constantly and you say feels wrong. In reality, this is correct. Under the hood you are talking with the k8s control plane and it’s taking that manifest and storing it. Other services are communicating with the control plane to understand what they have to do. In fact you can apply a directory of manifests, so you don’t have to specify each file individually.

Again there are many tools you can use to manage k8s. It is an orchestration system to manage pods and run them. You get to pick what tool you want to use. If you want something you can do from a git repo, you can use something like argocd or flux. This is considered to be gitops and more declarative. If you need a templating implementation, there are many, like helm, json net, and kustomize (although not a full templating language). These can help you define your manifests in a more repeatable and meaningful way, but you can always apply these using the same tools (kubectl, argocd, flux, etc…)

There are many services that can run in k8s that will solve one problem or another and these tools scale themselves, since they mostly all use the same designs that keep scalability in mind. I kept things very simple, but try out vanilla k8s first to understand what is going on. It’s great that you are questioning these things as it shows you understand there is probably something better that you can do. Now you just need to find the tools that are right for you. Ask what you hate or dislike about what you are doing and find a way to solve that and if there are any tools that can help. https://landscape.cncf.io/ is a good place to start to see what tools exist.

Anyway, good luck on your adventure. K8s is an enterprise tool after all and it’s not really meant for something like a home lab. It’s an orchestration system and NOT a platform that you can just start running stuff on without some effort. Getting it up and running is day 1 operations. Managing it and keeping it running is day 2 operations.

This is why I can’t stand Kickstarter and why I won’t ever use it again. It’s no risk to the people asking for handouts and it’s the people giving their money away that take on all the risks.

You pay for something, but you may never actually see it. The product fails and you get nothing. The product succeeds and you get the product you were hoping for, but it may not be 100% what you expected. Also, it’s not like you would get anything more than that, you are not an investor.

If I’m an investor, I take a risk and I could possibly lose all my money that I put into it, but at the tail end of that, if it’s successful, I will get my money back, plus more. Same risk, but better outcome.