K8s is kind of messy compared to Heroku, which I don't love, but is also way more powerful and can be more secure. I don't know what I'd use instead of it, exactly as you said.
Also, we run a VPC-only K3s node for some simple internal tools that works great as well.
It seems Dokku wins at "easier" since in many cases, you can just push the application code you used for development and the required stack is automatically detected. Adding a database is two commands. No need to know Dockerfiles.
I'll look more into it, but it didn't really inspire confidence.
We do exactly the same thing! We have a one-node k8s for all these dev things that just works. Everything is containerized for local dev anyway so moving it to k8s was just writing the deployment manifest.
On heroku, all of these would be separate dynos (or one glued-together dyno that does everything). On a self-hosted VM we'd have to deal with managing that.
I liked this approach so much that I now have a small 1-node personal cluster that hosts all of my private hobby projects that aren't ready for prime time yet, that were on heroku previously. Costs me only $10 + (persistent storage + IP address if needed)
Sure, maybe you two (@dvcrn and @arcticfox) don’t work together and don’t know each other, but it’s definitely more entertaining imagining the scenario above.