Well, that's not really what I did.

It was a variation of an earlier project that I had deployed to EC2.. just on EC2 I had a mess of fragile boto/fabric stuff to get the test/prod machines provisioned and the application installed. It "worked" but I had no redundancy and deploys were hard cut-overs.. and if the new version didn't come up for whatever reason, it was just down.

I didn't do anything in the application itself to design it to run on k8s, I was able to re-use some existing test code to define things like

        livenessProbe:
          exec:
            command:
            - /app/healthcheck.py
          initialDelaySeconds: 
          periodSeconds: 300
          timeoutSeconds: 5

so, 7 lines of yaml and I had self healing and rolling deployments. I could have built this out on EC2.. probably would have taken me a few hundred lines of terraform/ansible/whatever and never worked as well. It's the kind of thing where I could have maybe gotten rolling deployments working, but I would have just ended up with an "ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of k8s"

I would have been perfectly happy to just run this whole thing on EB/heroku/lambda/whatever but the application was doing low level tcp socket stuff, not http, and almost every PaaS these days wants you to speak http.