[solatic]

> But I never really see k8s being talked about in that context of “physical hardware that’s on prem, but not on MY prem.” Is there a reason for that? If we go with k8s is it going to bite us? Does anyone have experience with something like that they could share?

Kubernetes provides a leaky abstraction above the underlying hardware - the storage and networking are going to be different depending on who is maintaining the Kubernetes cluster. Kubernetes's strength is that it acknowledges the leakiness of the abstraction and makes it explicit. If your customer uses a specific networking and storage provider, Kubernetes makes it easier for you to say (or not) that you have certified your product for those networking and storage providers, and here's what the manifests look like, because there's a standard way of configuring the application to work with that networking (CNI, which powers the standard Service as well as maybe NetworkPolicies) and storage (CSI, specifically StorageClass) provider.

If you just provide Docker images, or VM appliances, then Murphy promises you that you're going to get frustrated support calls from customers saying "your application is slow and we don't understand why." Good luck then.