My boss viewed it as the main way to deploy containerized systems offered by cloud providers and figured we could run most of our internal only things in it for

My boss viewed it as the main way to deploy containerized systems offered by cloud providers and figured we could run most of our internal only things in it for a couple hundred a month - we don't really need the guarantees and scale, and he saw it as a way to avoid creating excess numbers of dedicated VMs, as cloud run isn't sufficient for our non-static stuff. This view up until now has actually been quite accurate because of the dedicated usage discounts. So I guess the big question in my mind is how do you run containerized apps in the major clouds besides K8s if it's a bulldozer and you just need a cargo bike? Is there something simpler?