And power to you. You did what you though was best in your circumstances.

Today circumstances have changed. You need hassle free scalable DB, then AWS RDS might you best choice. Maybe.

You need open standard IaaS, well, there is ton of options.

Even before K8S, you had and option of Openstack with Ansible. Yes, very different beast, but still much _simpler_ and _cheaper_ than stocking on large number of IT professionals.