It’s more like upfront paying a rented Lambo and the car dealer can order it back anytime without notice and reason. You know it’s rented although you paid a huge sum (often as high as a new Lambo) but it might have been the only way to get that specific model. You just hope they are a nice company and let you drive as long as possible. Also, you can’t resell it either ofc.

In German we say Raubkopie which translates to “robbery copy”. It sounds metal but linguistically puts it right next to actual robbery which is kinda insane.

I hope customer protection will eventually force new terms on the “you buy the rights to view a movie which can be revoked anytime without reason”. Like, given that most digital offers are priced nearly as high as their physical counterparts, there should be a law that the right must be given for at least 50 years or so.

Self hosting your own CI/CD is the key for OP. Littering is solved too because litter is only a problem on long running servers, which is an anti-pattern in a CI/CD environment.

We use renovate mostly for container images and nuget/npm/maven dependencies.

If it’s relevant for your job, go for k8s. The more you tinker with it, the more knowledge you’ll accumulate. Is it the optimal solution for a self hosting setup? Well, it depends but most probably not.