I somehow dont agree that K8s make things complicated. Its far more complicated to manage an EC2 based deployment then K8s based deployment. Patching the EC2 will become so complicated. In a scenario where all other applications are on K8s, maintaining the discourse on different platform and managing the integration become an overheard for the operations team. I am not sure what complication/restrictions are keeping discourse team to keep a distance form K8s specially when discourse EC2 based deployment is also a container based deployment only.