I have setups where the container orchestration was done completely by Terraform or Puppet. Docker Compose also comes a long way if you are not running a FAANG webscale service. If you manage your VM's basics with configuration management and infrastructure as code anyways, it's easy to bolt containers onto that and treat them like any other installable piece of code. Kubernetes does bring a nice abstraction if you have DevOps teams and separate Ops for your bare metal or Cloud.