It’s pretty close to get it up and running. It’s not close to operating. You have to roll your own load balancer, health checks, method of updating and managing the underlying nodes, you don’t have operators or guarantees about the control plane, etc...
Spin up a K8S in any major cloud provider and you get all this with a consistent API, which is where the value lies.
You have to do all those things, minus the load balancer, with Kubernetes. It’s only if you don’t run on-premise Kubernetes that really start to se benefits.
Honestly, as an ops guy, I would prefer to get up at 3AM do deal with a failed VM or load balancer, compared to dealing with any kind of failure in a Kubernetes cluster at 10AM.
I can understand wanting to be able to deploy to Kubernetes, it’s extremely flexible and relatively easy. But managing and debugging Kubernetes is still a nightmare, even just monitoring it correctly isn’t exactly easy.
Spin up a K8S in any major cloud provider and you get all this with a consistent API, which is where the value lies.