> Does distributed mean it’s replicated across machines?

No, in vineyard "distributed" doesn't mean data replicated across machines, rather, big data partitioned across machines. We address cases where the data cannot be fit into a single machine.

> Can this be run outside kubernetes or is it meant to be part of a big set of infra?

Yes, vineyard can run outside of kubernetes, but it would be a bit complicated to setup on many machines as a cluster.

Devops your vineyard cluster on kubernetes could leverage the ability of Kubernetes. We already have integrated with helm and there's a vineyard-operator in our roadmap.