> For the base case of I want to run a service and expose an http API it's pretty easy

Are you kidding me?

Before you can do anything, you need...

1. API Server

2. Scheduler

3. Kubernetes Controller Manager

4. etcd

5. Cloud Controller Manager

6. Nodes

7. Pods

8. Container Runtime Engine

9. kubelet

10. kube-proxy

And then before you can even expose it on HTTP you need an ingress, kube-dns, load balancer...

Oh, don't forget that you'll actually want Helm and all of its components...

Meanwhile, Nomad is a single binary, and it can even run scripts and other non-containerized workloads.