I rent six dedicated servers from a company in Germany. Together they have more cores, more memory, and more SSD than most production clusters I worked on a decade ago. I run my own Kubernetes on them. Not managed. Not EKS. Not GKE. The whole stack, from the immutable OS up to the workloads. People who hear this ask me why, and the question usually arrives in one of two tones. The dangerous tone is "that's amazing, how do I do it" . The responsible tone is "why on earth would you do that...