For me this is all Kubernetes is. I feel like people are often talking about two different things in discussions like this. For me it's just a uniform way to de

For me this is all Kubernetes is. I feel like people are often talking about two different things in discussions like this. For me it's just a uniform way to deploy stuff that is better than docker compose. We pay pennies for the control plane and workers are just generic VMs with kubelet. But I think for many "kubernetes" means your second paragraph. It doesn't have to be like that at all! People should try settling up a k3s cluster and just learn about workloads, services and ingresses. That's all you need to replace a bunch of ad hoc VMs and docker stuff.