I don't think you need to "wrestle it into submission". There are many CNCF projects that work great on bare metal instances like Rook and other companies provi

I don't think you need to "wrestle it into submission". There are many CNCF projects that work great on bare metal instances like Rook and other companies providing managed DB solutions for your hardware like KubeDB. K8s isn't that complex from a cluster operators perspective if you've managed bare metal Linux systems before. Set up some PXE + auto provisioning and you can make your node enrollment process: 1. Buy hardware from an OEM. 2. OEM ships you a piece of hardware. 3. Remote hands plug in hardware. 4. Machine PXEs, boots, and is turned into a worker on your cluster. Canonical (MaaS), VMware (vSphere), and Rancher Labs (Rancher) all have products aimed at running Kube on metal in your own datacenter. So, essentially, if you start your startup off using Kube in a managed cluster you can, at some point in time later, directly move your code off the cloud and onto your own machines for cost saving. You just need to figure out how to run your DBs and LBs but that's a solved problem as mentioned above.