If anyone is looking for a gentler, Heroku like onramp to Kubernetes, its exactly why I built Canine [1].

In retrospect, at my previous company, what we really needed in the early days was something that was Heroku-like (don't make me think about infra (!)) but could be easily added to and scaled up over time, as our service grew. We eventually grew to about 10M users, using the site monthly, and had to do a huge effort to migrate to Kubernetes.

Canine's philosophy is: full Kubernetes, with a deployment layer on top. If you ever out grow it, just dump Canine entirely, and work directly with the Kubernetes system it's operating. It even gives you all the K8s YAML config needed to offboard.

It's also similar to how the dev infra works at Airbnb (where I worked before that) -- Kubernetes underneath, a user friendly interface on top.