To use for example EKS (Amazon Kubernetes) you still have to provide worker nodes by using EC2 API.. which more or less means your infrastructure management is

To use for example EKS (Amazon Kubernetes) you still have to provide worker nodes by using EC2 API.. which more or less means your infrastructure management is in the same lock-in as you were previously while simply deploying with EC2 VMs.. Kubernetes doesnt solve the vendor lock in issue completely. You still need workers, external dns, databases, gateways and other to operate. The strength of Kubernetes comes in development speed. And thats pretty much it. You can push something out pretty fast and scale it. Ah, this and the fact its easier to find newbs familiar with k8s (they often have no idea how to deal with bare-metal). I wouldnt say the amount of operational work vs normal cloud management is simplified. Managing kubernetes cluster is painful, Ive witnessed 3 updates of EKS where each one broke some part of the cluster: dns / autoscaling / monitoring etc. But hey it is fast. Building runtime image with immutable layers is a huge adventage in itself.