… there's a difference between "can do it" and "is provided." In the case of either k8s or VMs, I supply the health check. There's no getting around that part,

… there's a difference between "can do it" and "is provided." In the case of either k8s or VMs, I supply the health check. There's no getting around that part, really. But that's it in the case of k8s. I'm not building out the logic to do the check, or the logic to pause a deployment if a check fails: that is inherent to the deployments controller. That's not the case with Ansible/Salt/etc.¹, and I end up re-inventing portions of the deployments controller every time. (Or, far more likely, it just gets missed/ignored until the first time it causes a real problem.) ¹and that's not what these tools are targetting, so I'm not sure it's really a gap, per se.