So, I think the downside of those systems is that they tend to be specific to a provider, so you get some lock in, and not all of those things are easy/possibl

So, I think the downside of those systems is that they tend to be specific to a provider, so you get some lock in, and not all of those things are easy/possible to run locally, whereas minikube or docker swarm can replicate a cluster locally, which I think is really important. Otherwise yeah, those systems can be used to accomplish the same goals. One thing that I think is non-obvious: there are easy ways to set up a kubernetes cluster, it's just that there's so many options out there that the easier solutions tend to get lost in the noise. If I had to manage kubernetes nodes manually I'd probably never do it, but setting up something like AKS/EKS/GKS -- they all have their own issues, but they're pretty easy to get started with.