Right, the key is "distributed systems". The overkill tends to come in when someone decides to use Kubernetes to run e.g. a single web application and database - which is not particularly "distributed" on the back end - or something that they could run with say Docker Compose on a single machine.

A chart of effort vs. complexity would show this nicely. Kubernetes involves a baseline level of effort that's higher than simpler alternatives, which is the "overkill" part of the chart. But once complexity reaches a certain level, the effort involved in alternatives grows higher and faster.

> (traffic/L7, config, storage, app instances, network/L1-4)

Cloud and PaaS providers can do a lot of this for you though. Of course some of the PaaS providers are built on Kubernetes, but the point is they're the ones expending that effort for you.