Personally I have moved to k3s, although after learning a bit too deep how k8s operates when writing custom controllers at the day job.

Docker/containers are great, especially for local development. But I feel the docker compose model quickly becomes a lot of messy brittle squeeze for little gain when multiple containers need to integrate.

Better then to just take the plunge for the "real deal" and set up a non-HA k8s/k3s cluster with the interactions between the workloads clearly specified.

In other words. I care care more about the interactions declaratively spelled out than the "scale to the moon" HA, auto-scaling, replicas or whatever people get sold on.

And LLMs make this even easier. If you love reviewing yaml manifests....