[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.