> - you pay for cloud provided k8s At this point, k8s is a cloud abstraction layer that is flexible enough that what's beneath it doesn't have to be a cloud, b

> - you pay for cloud provided k8s At this point, k8s is a cloud abstraction layer that is flexible enough that what's beneath it doesn't have to be a cloud, but in the vast majority of cases is a cloud. The various managed k8s flavors sit in between bare VMs (you control infrastructure) and any serverless offerings (what's infrastructure?), abstracting away a bunch of hard things while still offering a fair amount of flexibility and control, so you can layer other abstractions on top to make it look and function like serverless functions or a batch pipeline runner to your users or automate operations, governance and compliance tasks. The primary value (at least as I see it) that k8s adds lies in its API and the built-in automation it layers on top of the cloud (or non-cloud) below, which I find is a surprisingly good fit for a very wide range of needs. That's what many orgs that run k8s on bare metal are really after: Providing infrastructure users with a single well-known, high-quality API and making use of the wealth of compatible tooling and third-party products written against that API. Once you get to the point where you have a use for a fair amount of k8s features, I've found that home-grown setups tend to approximate a low-quality k8s clone anyway, so running k8s may end up the less painful route in some cases, but bare metal k8s clusters are a lot more rare than cloud-managed ones for a reason. Simpler setups can of course be run with less effort, and in a lot of cases, that's plenty good enough. A single VM with a monolithic app can go a long way, depending on the requirements.