k8s is really just the scheduler and gives you a uniform way to deploy the "vm" containers in the usual scenario. With k8s you can have workloads run on differe

k8s is really just the scheduler and gives you a uniform way to deploy the "vm" containers in the usual scenario. With k8s you can have workloads run on different runtimes like trusted=runc, untrusted=kata, etc and this is even easier now with RuntimeClass which you can write right inside of a regular k8s deployment yaml. Kata is actually just several binaries that talk via grpc (kata-agent, shim, proxy, runtime) and interface with QEMU/NEMU. For instance kata-proxy proxies commands over virtios serial interface that's exposed via QEMU. You could install the binaries and qemu-lite and have a similar system but I'm not really sure how you'd benefit as it's the management through k8s that really won me over. I think in your scenario you'd just be making very complicated QEMU vms. I've linked this to the contribs, maybe they have some thoughts.