Current hosted Kubernetes-as-a-service models like Google Container Engine (https://cloud.google.com/container-engine) still make the VMs available to you. Other options in the market are very similar to this, and don't provide what you're asking.

But I think if you consider that

  * you never bother provisioning of these VMs
  * Container Engine autoscales VMs for you
  * Container Engine updates the OS and the Kubernetes versions for you automatically
  * you never need to SSH into the VMs

you can pretty much think "there are no VMs" even though there are. There's features out there that do VM autoscaling, so when you're not using your cluster fully (i.e have empty nodes laying around), Container Engine will delete some of the empty VMs and shift workloads to the rest of the VMs.

I'd say give it a try.

It feels to me that you might be looking for something like Firebase, Zeit Now, TJ's up, or even Graphcool, depending on your needs.

With Kubernetes, even on hosted services like GKE or semi-managed like Tectonic you will be paying premium.

Either way when you're large enough (e.g. 100+ nodes), you need to think about your VMs: i.e. default sysctl settings and similar are not one size fits all.

Azure Container Service (AKS) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/intro-kubernetes and it's free, you only pay for the used resources ie VMs