[jasongi]

Managed Kubernetes (e.g GKE) is a hosted service, just a very flexible one. There is a gap between everything runs on Heroku and Big Enough to have a DevOps team that is pretty large. You tend to outgrow heroku pretty quick if your app has much complexity at all.

Used to work somewhere that just used some VPSes instead of managed hosting. That 20% time was spent on debugging OS issues, disk space issues, OS package updates, downtime needed to increase instance sizing, documenting (read: not actually documenting just leaving it up to the next person) how to rebuild the environment etc etc.