[pg-gadfly]

_any_ non-proprietary tool is "cloud agnostic". Kubernetes is bundled software, and achieves the things those pieces achieve. There is nothing holy about k8s specifically, the tools you train with are easy, and it's very easy to get skewed opinions on that.

For example a lot of people would find writing scripts cumbersome, but not a person who's written a lot of them. They're not any more fragile than other logic error capable software is

[kryptk]

You didnt avtually answer the question: What free, cloud agnostic tools let me specify "keep 60% cpu load average" and work the rest out?

With k8s, a horizontal autoscaler is a few lines in a yaml file and the result works in any cluster run by any vendor.

[pg-gadfly]

Any load balancer will let you do that. Scaling is a few lines of scripts to do on any platform, and well worth the couple minutes, you don't even need a tool for just that.

No tool "works the rest out". It's _always_ a compromise, because inherent complexity can never be removed, only moved. What you gain in one area, encumbers another.

You may freely use k8s, but it's not magical nor easier to use than any existing systems. In fact adopting it often takes non-trivial time and the web is full of failure stories with very benign warnings and catastropic results.