Sure, there is configuration that goes into using your cloud provider's "infrastructure primatives". My point is that Kubernetes is often using those anyway, and if you don't understand them you're unprepared to respond in the case that your cloud provider has an issue.
In terms of the effort to deploy something new, for my organization it's low. We have a Terraform module creates the infrastructure, glues the pieces together, tags stuff, makes sure everything is configured uniformly. You specify some basic parameters for your deployment and you're off to the races.
We don't need to add yet more complexity with a Kubernetes-specific cost tracking software, AWS does it for us automatically. We don't have to care about how pods are sized and how those pods might or might not fit on nodes. Autoscaling gives us consistently sized EC2 instances that, in my experience, have never run into issues because we have a bad neighbor. Most importantly of all, I don't have upgrade anxiety because there are a ton of services stacked on one Kubernetes cluster which may suffer issues if an upgrade does not go well.
In terms of the effort to deploy something new, for my organization it's low. We have a Terraform module creates the infrastructure, glues the pieces together, tags stuff, makes sure everything is configured uniformly. You specify some basic parameters for your deployment and you're off to the races.
We don't need to add yet more complexity with a Kubernetes-specific cost tracking software, AWS does it for us automatically. We don't have to care about how pods are sized and how those pods might or might not fit on nodes. Autoscaling gives us consistently sized EC2 instances that, in my experience, have never run into issues because we have a bad neighbor. Most importantly of all, I don't have upgrade anxiety because there are a ton of services stacked on one Kubernetes cluster which may suffer issues if an upgrade does not go well.