It is a lot easier on the public cloud, or easier still on a managed service.
You're absolutely right that it takes some effort.
on costs via Reserved Instances and negotiating with your account team at larger volume, it can be pretty reasonable, and for a smaller outfit, substantially cheaper than hiring experts in running physical infrastructure of your own.
You needs to have the skillsets to manage cloud deployments too. For the systems I manage, which range from actual bare metal, via dedicated servers, to VPSs and AWS deployments, the incremental effort spent on managing hardware as you go down towards bare metal tends to be pretty much a rounding error compard to the overall operations effort. Once the systems have been wired up, and PXE booted into a suitable setup, the effort is pretty much the same.
And with the cost differential, I'd say once you go over a few hundred dollars a month on servers that stay up 24/7, you're losing money on public cloud deployments vs. managed dedicated hosting. Once you go over $1k to $2k/month, you're losing money vs. colo.
For people who actually have a lot of batch jobs where servers stay up for less than 6-8 hours a day, the maths look different, but it's very rare I come across cloud setups that are cheaper than dedicated, with all staff costs etc. accounted for.
The Kubernetes on baremetal setup above is for full automation. You can do simpler manual installs with bootkube[1] or kubeadm[2]; and this will further simplifying over the next few months.
[1] https://github.com/kubernetes-incubator/bootkube
[2] http://kubernetes.io/docs/getting-started-guides/kubeadm/
I've been keeping an eye out waiting to feel more comfortable to use and support a kube cluster on bare metal.