[parkingrift]

>No, you don't. There's no slider for "network performance" on GCP, Azure or AWS.

Who said there was a slider? Network performance is one of the key filters on every major cloud provider. Not every instance type has the same network performance.

>You still do with kubernetes

Sort of. It can be way more abstracted away. What's the minimum I need to run a node? Okay great, now run as many nodes as needed, when needed. To set that kind of thing up with bare metal on AWS, for example, would require getting into some proprietary offerings and/or absurd complexity.

I had to actually go and look up with our default instance type was for our cluster. It's a rather useless fact since it doesn't much matter compared to the number of active nodes. That's not true at all if you're directly managing VMs.

I'd absolutely never trade the complexity of kubernetes for the complexity of self-managing a horizontally scalable bare metal VM implementation. However, some people (obviously) disagree with that. To each their own.