K8s isn't even hard! My team of three manages everything on K8s and we spend ~0 minutes per week on it. Write a script to generate some YAML files, stick it in a CI pipeline, and it's basically fire-and-forget.

You're going to want most of what K8s has anyway: blue-green deployments, some way to specify how many replicas you want, health checks, etc.

The initial setup cost is annoying if you've never done it before, but in terms of maintenance it's very very easy.