“People should use Kubernetes instead” is an interesting take considering your first paragraph. :) You’ve perhaps not had to troubleshooting issues in a more advanced k8s setup - that is something that is not “for most people”.

Keeping services discoverable, with service health-checks and configuration data at hand in the k/v is not needed in the “cloud”? I guess a lot comes down to how you opt to manage you services… It’s what etc does, but worse (imo), for k8s. My usual work with larger infrastructure spans more than k8s or a single provider, hence consul is a given.

To my knowledge no other secrets solution exists that cover all the things vault does, and at the same lets you stay provider agnostic. It integrates well with the major cloud providers though!