My way of thinking about it is this: you have your own hyper-flexible Heroku, but (monkey's paw curls) you can only interact with it by typing large amounts of

My way of thinking about it is this: you have your own hyper-flexible Heroku, but (monkey's paw curls) you can only interact with it by typing large amounts of YAML. Oh, and all the documentation for that YAML assumes you've memorized as much vocabulary as a Foreign Language 101 class. (And there is a mad god that says: if you try to use click-ops to get around this without knowing the vocabulary, you're going to have a bad time.) But on the other hand: to put it in terms of the "3 servers" - the moment you think you'll have 3 servers, and any level of uptime expectations, you'll inevitably have to rebuild them, services and logging and all, from scratch often and quickly enough that you might as well have 20 servers with how stressful that rebuild will be. k8s can be a saving grace there, and I recommend it to anyone with the time and interest in how cluster best practices work! But it's not a free option or a weekend skill-up.