I think the tricky part of the sale will be in abstracting away Kubernetes; or at least, not adopting its conventions for registration and discovery of resources/endpoints. You can keep those and not use Kubernetes, which is more or less how Knative went about it (insofar as it's possible to create an implementation that's Knative without using Kubernetes).
I am however overall very sympathetic to the idea that Kubernetes never drew a crisp line between roles.
I am however overall very sympathetic to the idea that Kubernetes never drew a crisp line between roles.
Disclosure: I'm writing a book about Knative.