[AlexB138]

That's not entirely true. I attend meet-ups with engineers from a fairly large company whose name you would recognize who run K8s on bare metal. I know that's vague, but I don't know how public their infrastructure is, so I'd rather not speak out of turn.

You're absolutely right that it takes some effort.

[SEJeff]

Bloomberg runs Kubernetes on bare metal and one of my friends is an engineer on the project (but did not speak at KubeCon about it). They've got a relatively sizable install as well.