> That being said, why would I not use the actual free upstream Kubernetes for my on-prem distribution ? (with the help of one of the thousands installer out there like kube-adm, kubespray, etc).
None of them actually provision your infra for you (VMs, LB rules etc). GKE On-Prem will.
Ok, thanks I got it, you are bundling everything into a VMWare image, that boots ready to use.
Is it fair to say that this is similar to Canonical Ubuntu MAAS + Juju Kubernetes? I'm sure that Red Hat Openshift must have something similar also to install directly on a pool of managed bare metals.
None of them actually provision your infra for you (VMs, LB rules etc). GKE On-Prem will.