[jcrawfordor]

Honestly my experience has been that managed k8s is often more complicated from a developer perspective than just k8s - sure, you don't have to deal with setting it up, but you have to figure out how all the 'management' and provider-specific features work, and they often seem pretty clumsily integrated.

[geerlingguy]

And in many cases features that would help your use case aren't enabled on that platform, or are in a release that's still a year or two from being supported on that platform... I'm looking at you, EKS.

[GordonS]

I really wish cloud providers would offer a managed Docker Swarm service - it's so much simpler than k8s, but not having to manage the underlying machines would be great.

I might be remembering wrongly, but I think Azure actually used to offer multiple managed orchestration platforms, including DCOS and Swarm, before they went all-in on k8s.