(Acorn cofounder) We largely agree ourselves (so much we wrote Rancher 1.x with its own simpler runtime, before k8s took over the world). But that's the obvio

(Acorn cofounder) We largely agree ourselves (so much we wrote Rancher 1.x with its own simpler runtime, before k8s took over the world). But that's the obvious runtime the market is interested in right now. So what we are focusing on is let the infrastructure/ops team do their k8s thing, but insulate the devs/people that just want to run apps from it. If real demand for it appears, with that abstraction we could write an alternate backend that talks to say Nomad or a-fancy-shell-script-that-runs-docker-cli instead of k8s. And then your app's Acornfile could now run on a totally different runtime, with no (or maybe minimal) changes.