[tnjm]

While I wouldn't dream of standing up k8s on a bare metal cluster without a devops team, I set up managed k8s using EKS several years ago for a client and... it just chugs along, self-healing, with essentially zero maintenance.

For my own projects I use a managed Northflank cluster on my own AWS account and likewise... just a fantastic experience. Everything that Heroku could and should have been. Yes the cluster is a bit pricey to stand up both in terms of EC2 compute and management layer costs, but once it's there, it's there. And the costs scale much more nicely than shoving side projects onto Heroku.

At this stage I consider managed k8s my default go-to unless it's something so lightweight I just want to push it to Vercel and forget about it.