Owning every stone is not the same as controlling the kingdom. In the previous chapter of The Kingdom in the Clouds, Kubernetes provided a way to coordinate workloads across multiple machines. Pods could be replaced, deployments could maintain the desired state, and services could provide changing workloads with stable ways to communicate. That solved an important orchestration problem, but it left a deeper question unanswered: where do those machines come from, who maintains them, and how much responsibility should belong to the team running the application? Every container eventually consumes real processor time, memory, storage, and network capacity somewhere. Cloud infrastructure begins with the recognition that those resources have not…