ha. Cloud Native ≠ Native Cloud Services.
I always found it odd that the marketing successfully pivoted the term Cloud Native from meaning 'managed services consumed as APIs over the internet' to a generic umbrella for self-hosted versions of the cloud control planes and container management tooling.
That isn't a dig at the particular tools themselves - they just aren't... you know... cloud.
K8s mostly provides that layer. What’s missing is for cloud providers to implement all their services as k8s resources. Many already are, like all the networking stuff, VMs, storage and loadbalancers. I think it’s missing things like an object or kv store, sql databases, etc. won’t be surprised if they eventually make their way there. But like everything complicated, you’ll end up with people taking dependence’s on various vendor specific behaviors or features.
f you were trying to unify cloud providers existing manages services and consume them as APIs over the internet, you would begin by defining what that API is, not adopt an existing vendor API. And that’s what k8s did.