Kubernetes has become the default answer to a question most Indian MSMEs have not actually asked. Somebody proposes it, nobody wants to be the person who said no to the industry standard, and six months later a two person team is maintaining a cluster instead of shipping features.
We manage cloud infrastructure for a living and would be perfectly happy to bill for running your cluster. We think most businesses our size should not have one.
Start here, because the pricing conversation misleads people in both directions.
A managed control plane is cheap or free. Azure AKS has a free tier at zero cost, with a paid Standard tier at roughly 73 dollars a month that adds an uptime SLA. DigitalOcean gives you a free control plane by default. AWS EKS and Google GKE both charge around 73 dollars a month per cluster, though GKE offers a monthly credit that effectively covers one zonal cluster.
So the entry ticket is somewhere between nothing and the price of a decent lunch for the team. If cost were the objection, Kubernetes would be an easy yes.
One trap worth knowing while we are on pricing: EKS clusters left on a Kubernetes version that has moved into extended support jump to roughly 438 dollars a month. Falling behind on upgrades is expensive in a way that is easy to miss.
The 2025 Komodor enterprise Kubernetes report, surveying organisations running Kubernetes in production, found that more than 82 percent of workloads are overprovisioned, over 65 percent use less than half the CPU and memory they request, and only 7 percent have accurate requests and limits set.
Seven percent. These are organisations that chose Kubernetes deliberately, at scale, with budget.
The same report found 68 percent have created dedicated platform teams. That is the honest price tag. The answer to Kubernetes complexity at enterprise scale was hiring people whose entire job is the platform.
It also found 79 percent of production incidents follow a recent change, with a median 37 minutes to detect a high impact outage and another 51 minutes to resolve it. Those numbers come from teams with specialists on staff.
If a company with a platform team cannot get resource requests right, a twenty person business with one capable generalist is not going to either. That is not a criticism of your team. It is arithmetic.
It is a serious tool that solves real problems, and the case for it is not imaginary:
If you are running three services on two machines, you are paying the full complexity bill for benefits you are not collecting.
Almost everything we see at this size fits one of these, with a fraction of the operational load:
The common thread is that someone else operates the hard part. That is the same trade you already made by moving to cloud in the first place.
Managed Kubernetes removes the burden of running the control plane. It does not remove the burden of understanding Kubernetes.
Three questions, and you need a yes to the first two:
If you answered no, no, and no, you do not need Kubernetes, and choosing the simpler option is the senior decision rather than the timid one.
A well run application on App Service will beat a badly run cluster on every measure your customers can perceive. We wrote about where that money tends to leak instead in seven places Indian businesses overspend on cloud.
If you would like an honest assessment of what your workloads actually need, including the cases where the answer is a cluster, start the conversation on our contact page.
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