Can we run it without a dedicated team?

With a managed service and disciplined automation, a small team can. What does not work is treating it as something everyone maintains occasionally. Someone has to own it, and if nobody can, a simpler platform is the better answer for you.

Should we self-manage or use EKS, GKE, or AKS?

Managed, in almost every case. Running your own control plane adds significant work and buys very little unless you have specific sovereignty or hardware requirements. The managed premium is far cheaper than the engineering hours it replaces.

Can you take over an existing cluster?

Yes, and we start with a review covering resource limits, RBAC, network policy, secret handling, and how much of the cluster exists only in someone’s command history rather than in code. That review usually explains the instability by itself.

Is Kubernetes overkill for one application?

Almost always, unless that application is unusually large or has strict placement requirements. A single service on a managed container platform gives you most of the benefit with a fraction of the complexity, and costs less to run.

Kubernetes
Development Services

Stateside Digitals provides Kubernetes development services for teams who have outgrown running containers by hand, and straight advice for the ones who have not yet, which is more of them than the industry admits.

Kubernetes runs containers across a group of machines and decides where each one belongs. It restarts what fails, adds copies as demand rises, replaces old versions with new ones a few at a time, and routes traffic only to whatever is currently healthy. None of that requires somebody to be watching a dashboard when it happens.

For a business, that is genuinely valuable and genuinely expensive. Kubernetes solves problems that only appear at a certain size, and it brings in a system needing its own expertise to operate. The honest question is not what it can do, which is a great deal, but whether the things it does map onto problems you actually have right now.

Heals Without Waking You

Failed Containers Restart

A crashed service is replaced automatically, so a fault at three in the morning becomes a log entry instead of a phone call.

Runs Anywhere You Do

Same Setup On Any Cloud

The same configuration works across providers and your own hardware, which keeps a move between them a project rather than a rebuild.

Releases Without Downtime

Rolling Updates Built In

New versions replace old ones gradually while traffic keeps flowing, and a failing release stops rolling out on its own.

Many Services, One Platform

Dozens of services owned by different teams, each deploying on its own schedule without waiting for anyone else’s release window.

Multi-Cloud And Hybrid

Workloads spread across more than one provider, or split between a cloud and your own data centre, running the same way in each without maintaining two separate approaches.

Regulated Workloads

Systems that must stay on infrastructure you control for compliance reasons, but still need the automation a managed platform gives.

For most businesses running a handful of services, no. A managed container platform such as ECS, Cloud Run, or App Service will run exactly the same containers with a fraction of the operational surface, and we would rather say so than sell you a cluster you will then need help operating indefinitely. That is a subscription, not a solution.

Kubernetes earns its complexity under four conditions: many services deploying independently, teams that need to ship without coordinating with each other, workloads spread across more than one environment, or scaling patterns irregular enough that fixed capacity wastes real money. If two or more describe you, the overhead starts paying for itself. If none do, it is cost without return.

We build on managed Kubernetes through EKS, GKE, or AKS rather than running control planes ourselves, provisioned in Terraform so a cluster can be rebuilt rather than remembered. Deployments run through Argo CD or Flux from Git, packaged with Helm. Ingress, certificates, autoscaling, network policy, and RBAC are configured deliberately, with monitoring through Prometheus and Grafana.

Kubernetes
EKS
GKE
AKS
Terraform
Argo CD
Flux
Helm
Ingress
RBAC
Prometheus
Grafana

Managed Control Plane

Resource Limits Set

GitOps, Not kubectl

Cost Visible Per Team

EKS, GKE or AKS rather than a control plane of your own, because running one buys very little and costs engineering hours indefinitely.

Every workload gets requests and limits, which is what stops one badly behaved service starving everything sharing its node.

Changes arrive through Git and are applied by Argo CD or Flux, so the cluster matches a reviewed commit rather than somebody’s command history.

Namespaces and labels are set up so spend can be attributed, because a single cluster bill nobody owns only ever grows.

Managed Control Plane

Resource Limits Set

GitOps, Not kubectl

Cost Visible Per Team

More than the machines suggest. Beyond compute there is the control plane charge, load balancers, storage, monitoring, and the engineering time to operate it. That last one is the largest and the one most often left out of the comparison entirely.

Kubernetes
Development Services