Struggling to compare it to k8s but maybe that's just my lack of knowledge on k8s.

However, to the general HN crowd my question is what would be the correct abstraction for something that wants to replace k8s to make one think that this new abstraction is simple enough.

In my naive understanding, I would think that if I don't have to think beyond a docker-compose.yml that would be the right level of simple. To clarify, locally I work with the docker compose file to bring up my services, and I should be able to just deploy it to AWS for example.