Running Kubernetes well is deceptively hard. The control plane is just the beginning — you still have to care about node pool sizing, OS patching, add-on upgrades, autoscaler tuning, CNI compatibility, observability, and a hundred other things that have nothing to do with your actual workloads. Both AWS and Google Cloud have responded to this with “managed mode” cluster variants: EKS Auto Mode and GKE Autopilot. The pitch is the same: hand us the node layer and we’ll keep it running, just the way you they like.