Been there. Simple python django app. Max 20 APIs. Expecting 100 requests per month. But POs and directors wanted shiny DevOps tools. Problems with typical MNCs. Every quarter manager/director comes with some new hype.
Helm. I’m staring at 20 pages of Yaml. Most of it seems arbitrary. Crap ton of interconnections. Plus defining all iam roles.
Doesn’t help that devops team keeps writing custom scripts to interact with it.
You can use the external services the same way if they are already setup with things like DATABASE_URL that holds a postgres connection string to amazon RDS, etc. Running k8s doesn't mean you have to move your entire stack into k8s, you can still use hosted services just fine.
In all my time with k8s, I never used Helm. If you don't need it, don't use it and keep it simple. k8s can do a ton of stuff but in reality, you barely need more than the basic.