Why skip point 1 and do some strange tangent on a SaaS product unrelated to using k8s or not?
Most people looking into (and using) k8s that are being told the "you most avoid vendor lock in!" selling point are nowhere near the size where it matters. But I know there's essentially bulk-pricing, as we have it where I work as well. That it's because of picking k8s or not however is an extremely long stretch, and imo mostly rationalization. There's nothing saying that a cloud move without k8s couldn't be done within the same amount of time. Or that even k8s is the main problem, I imagine it isn't since it's usually supposed to be stateless apps.
The point was about vendor lock, which you asserted is not a good reason to make a move, such as this. The "tangent" about a SaaS product was to make it clear what happens when you build your system in such a way as-to become entirely dependent on that vendor. Just because Auth0 is not part of one of the big "cloud" providers, doesn't make it any less vendor-locky. Almost all of the vendor services offered on the big clouds are extremely vendor-locked and non-portable.
Where you buy compute from is just as big of a deal as where you buy your other SaaS' from. In all of the cases, if you cannot move even if you had to (ie. it'll take 1 year+ to move), then you are not in a good position.
Addressing your #1 point - if you use a regular database that happens to be offered by a cloud provider (ie. Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, etc) then you can pick up and move. If you use something proprietary like CosmoDB, then you are stuck or face significant efforts to migrate.
With k8s, moving to another cloud can be as simple as creating an account and updating your configs to point at the new cluster. You can run every service you need inside your cluster if you wanted. You have freedom of choice and mobility.
> Most people looking into (and using) k8s that are being told the "you most avoid vendor lock in!" selling point are nowhere near the size where it matters.
This is just simply wrong, as highlighted by the SaaS example I provided. If you think you are too small so it doesn't matter, and decide to embrace all of the cloud vendor's proprietary services... what happens to you when that cloud provider decides to change their billing model, or dramatically increases price? You are screwed and have no options but cough up more money.
There's more decisions to make and consider regarding choosing a cloud platform and services than just whatever is easiest to use today - for any size of business.
I have found that, in general, people are afraid of using k8s because it isn't trivial to understand for most developers. People often mistakenly believe k8s is only useful when you're "google scale". It solves a lot of problems, including reduced vendor-lock.
Most people looking into (and using) k8s that are being told the "you most avoid vendor lock in!" selling point are nowhere near the size where it matters. But I know there's essentially bulk-pricing, as we have it where I work as well. That it's because of picking k8s or not however is an extremely long stretch, and imo mostly rationalization. There's nothing saying that a cloud move without k8s couldn't be done within the same amount of time. Or that even k8s is the main problem, I imagine it isn't since it's usually supposed to be stateless apps.