Current hosted Kubernetes-as-a-service models like Google Container Engine (https://cloud.google.com/container-engine https://cloud.google.com/container-engine)

Current hosted Kubernetes-as-a-service models like Google Container Engine (https://cloud.google.com/container-engine https://cloud.google.com/container-engine) still make the VMs available to you. Other options in the market are very similar to this, and don't provide what you're asking. But I think if you consider that * you never bother provisioning of these VMs * Container Engine autoscales VMs for you * Container Engine updates the OS and the Kubernetes versions for you automatically * you never need to SSH into the VMs you can pretty much think "there are no VMs" even though there are. There's features out there that do VM autoscaling, so when you're not using your cluster fully (i.e have empty nodes laying around), Container Engine will delete some of the empty VMs and shift workloads to the rest of the VMs. I'd say give it a try.