Exercise 3: Should a Small Single-VM Startup Adopt Kubernetes? — Possible Solution
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Recommendation: No, not for this specific scenario.

Justification, using this chapter's "When You Don't Need Kubernetes"
material directly:

The chapter states plainly: "a small application running on a single
server, or even Docker Compose on one host, doesn't need Kubernetes'
complexity." This scenario matches that description almost exactly --
one application, one VM, light and PREDICTABLE traffic (no mention of
scaling needs, multi-region requirements, or high-availability
demands that would push toward needing orchestration across many
machines).

Per the chapter, "Kubernetes solves problems that only really appear
at a certain scale" -- specifically the problems named earlier in the
chapter: coordinating scheduling across MANY hosts, automatically
recovering from a HOST failure by relaunching containers elsewhere,
and managing FLEET-WIDE rolling updates across many machines. None of
these problems are actually present in a single-VM deployment -- there
is no fleet to schedule across, no other host to fail over to, and no
fleet-wide rollout to coordinate. Adopting Kubernetes here would mean
taking on its real operational complexity (per the chapter's own
warning, "adopting it prematurely adds real operational overhead
without a corresponding benefit") -- learning and maintaining a
control plane, cluster networking, and all the concepts from the rest
of this course -- to solve problems this specific deployment doesn't
actually have.

If this startup's needs change later -- genuine growth requiring
multiple hosts, a need for automatic failover, or frequent coordinated
rollouts across several servers -- that would be the point at which
revisiting this decision would make sense, not before.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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This applies the chapter's own explicit "when you don't need
Kubernetes" section directly to the given scenario's specific details
(single VM, light/predictable traffic, no stated multi-host or
scaling need), rather than defaulting to a generic "Kubernetes is
industry standard, use it" answer -- matching the chapter's own
deliberate, honest counterpoint against hype-driven adoption.