Comment by maxdo

kubernetes is an API for your cluster, that is portable between providers, more or less. there are other abstractions, but they are not portable, e.g. fly.io, DO etc. so unless you want a vendor lock-in, you need it. for one of my products, I had to migrate due to business reasons 4 times into different kube flavors, from self-manged ( 2 times ) to GKE and EKS.