Similar deal here. My $dayjob title is "Cloud Engineer" and I spend a lot of my time working with AKS and Istio. But for some recent personal projects at home, I've just been running Docker Swarm on a single server. It's just lighter and less complicated, and for what I'm doing it more than satisfies my needs. Now if this was going to production at mass scale, I might consider switching to K8S, but for experimentation and initial development, it would be way overkill.