> what your company likely needs is some implementation of libvirtd or proxmox. run your workloads on rootless podman or (god forbid) deploy to a single VM.
Even with a single VM, someone's company probably will also want a reverse proxy and certificate management (assuming web services), automated deployments, provide secrets to services, storage volumes, health checks with auto restarts, ability to wire logs and metrics to some type of monitoring system, etc. All of this is possible with scripts and config management tools but now complexity is being managed in different ways. Alternatively use K3s and Flux to end up with a solution that checks all of those boxes while also having the option to use k8s manifests in public clouds.
Even with a single VM, someone's company probably will also want a reverse proxy and certificate management (assuming web services), automated deployments, provide secrets to services, storage volumes, health checks with auto restarts, ability to wire logs and metrics to some type of monitoring system, etc. All of this is possible with scripts and config management tools but now complexity is being managed in different ways. Alternatively use K3s and Flux to end up with a solution that checks all of those boxes while also having the option to use k8s manifests in public clouds.