The implication of using K8s to avoid vendor lock-in might also lead to self-hosting your databases and other supporting software.
In this case, you're just standing up normal servers in the cloud, which is pretty trivial in all of the major clouds' terraform providers. As long as the OS on the servers is standard (say, CentOS or ubuntu), your Config as Code stack (think ansible/puppet) won't really care which cloud provider you're using.
If they need to scale, they can add in another server to their infra as code, and make sure the config as code can handle more than one server. Not really that difficult with a little experience with terraform and ansible. There's also room for Auto scaling groups, which all of the major cloud providers support as well.
Gotcha, it sounds like terraform by itself might be enough too handle the autoscaling groups, that’s mentioned a few times here and something I was looking at with k8.
In this case, you're just standing up normal servers in the cloud, which is pretty trivial in all of the major clouds' terraform providers. As long as the OS on the servers is standard (say, CentOS or ubuntu), your Config as Code stack (think ansible/puppet) won't really care which cloud provider you're using.
If they need to scale, they can add in another server to their infra as code, and make sure the config as code can handle more than one server. Not really that difficult with a little experience with terraform and ansible. There's also room for Auto scaling groups, which all of the major cloud providers support as well.