Not only is it a fair comparison, but I'd say it's the entire raison d'etre of using any orchestration platform: You get to farm out bits of the infrastructure to others. Getting on k8s enables you to not have to run your own infrastructure, whereas having VMs being your abstraction sorta by definition does not.
Exactly!
> How is that a fair comparison?
Not only is it a fair comparison, but I'd say it's the entire raison d'etre of using any orchestration platform: You get to farm out bits of the infrastructure to others. Getting on k8s enables you to not have to run your own infrastructure, whereas having VMs being your abstraction sorta by definition does not.