But: I've also been put in the terrible position of supporting a platform sold to run on kubernetes in an air gapped, on prem, bare metal environment.

But: I've also been put into the terrible position of fighting vendors armed with agile, k8s and microservices selling that combined mayhem as a replacement for an openmp,openacc based massively parallel, on prem, bare metal HPC system with a strongly conservative development and operational tradition.

I understand loving efficiency and time savings but not everything simply works better with k8s.