Creating a cluster is a one-liner, no Ansible required. The node pool comes with that, which sets up the hosts. Databases are all created in cluster with a helm chart.
Many people will advise against running stateful workloads in k8s. It's tricky, sure, but the benefits are still there.
As a result of the orchestration my team has built on top of k8s, any developer in my organization can clone any production environment at any time with production data. Those cloned environments can be configured to receive streaming updates from the production environment, once created.
Developers can test bug fixes and features on live streaming production data with absolute certainty that they won't break anything. This capability is immensely valuable.
