Our story involves moving onto k8s, then moving off it. We run most of our app on Google App Engine explicitly to avoid devops work. However, we have a statele

Our story involves moving onto k8s, then moving off it. We run most of our app on Google App Engine explicitly to avoid devops work. However, we have a stateless-but-memory-hungry image manipulation service that was just too expensive on GAE. We migrated that service to k8s on Digital Ocean. It was a disaster. I mean, it worked, but suddenly we were spending a lot of time learning k8s and fussing with k8s and it slowed down feature development. K8s is a time sink. So we migrated the service to Digital Ocean App Platform and velocity returned to normal. I'm not wholly thrilled with DO App Platform. It has some maturity issues, and while it's cheaper than GAE, RAM is still more expensive than Elastic Beanstalk (which charges you more or less the EC2 VM cost). So we'll probably move it there someday.