Kubernetes solves real problems—scheduling, scaling, declarative config,
and a rich ecosystem—but it also adds operational surface area. For many
stores, well-managed VMs or platform-as-a-service offerings deliver what
the business needs with less daily cognitive load.
Consider clusters when you have multiple services that must scale
independently, strong in-house platform skills, or a mandate to standardize
on cloud-native tooling across many applications. If your bottleneck is
PHP runtime tuning, database performance, or checkout flow, moving to
Kubernetes rarely fixes that by itself.
When you do adopt it, invest in GitOps or an equivalent workflow, clear
namespace boundaries, and observability from day one. The cost of a
“minimal” cluster that nobody fully understands usually shows up during
the first serious incident.