My boss viewed it as the main way to deploy containerized systems offered by cloud providers and figured we could run most of our internal only things in it for a couple hundred a month - we don't really need the guarantees and scale, and he saw it as a way to avoid creating excess numbers of dedicated VMs, as cloud run isn't sufficient for our non-static stuff. This view up until now has actually been quite accurate because of the dedicated usage discounts.

So I guess the big question in my mind is how do you run containerized apps in the major clouds besides K8s if it's a bulldozer and you just need a cargo bike? Is there something simpler?