So… too many cooks creating overly complicated meals that occasionally are admirably but more often then not are not worth the money. Also really hard to get into and make more efficient.

Bloated complex frontend with so gosh darn many tools, some specifically created for one certain meals but sometimes get used for other meals, more or less effective. Sometimes it’s already at the table, sometimes gets delivered with your meal.

Fancy looking APIs but you somehow have to know how to correctly talk to them and if you phrase something wrong, well good luck.

VS:

Simple, efficient, maybe not as sophisticated but if you get too many customers: just order a second one.

Have you ever tried changing anything substantial in any other editor? It’s a nightmare if you want a custom experience.

Self hosting your own CI/CD is the key for OP. Littering is solved too because litter is only a problem on long running servers, which is an anti-pattern in a CI/CD environment.

10 is a bit exaggerating. What do you really need?

ExternalDNS is nice so you don’t have to config your DNS manually. You might need to install your own Ingress controller. If you want to automatically add and renew certificates cert-manager is great. Security is important! Speaking of, you should add some kind of secret management (something like sealed-secrets, vault or Secrets Store CSI Driver).

A really important thing is monitoring so you know your pods and the cluster itself is healthy. Prometheus is still king in that regard in my opinion. PromQL isn’t that hard. Of course some kind of alerting like AlertManager is a must for prod environments. Be aware that the front ends of those tools are not behind a login so something like oauth2-proxy and dex is vital! You might want to have some visualisation too so Grafana is a nice addition. If you add Loki too you got your OPs covered.

Keeping track of all of your stuff is the hard part so some GitOps is highly recommended. ArgoCD or FluxCD are popular for a reason!

I think that should cover the basic setup so you may scale your CRUD app without worries!

Stuff like that exists to remind us of the Java in JavaScript

We use renovate mostly for container images and nuget/npm/maven dependencies.

If it’s relevant for your job, go for k8s. The more you tinker with it, the more knowledge you’ll accumulate. Is it the optimal solution for a self hosting setup? Well, it depends but most probably not.