Can fully relate to the author. We have been struggling with effective k8s at our company for 2 years now. Too much to learn to get your first service in production. You will end up writing wrappers after wrappers that make you think “we can’t be the first guys to solve this” and after googling, you find that every issue you find is described as “just” one of the downsides of using k8s and here’s how we overcame it.
I wish someone can make a deployment orchestrator for your private DC that is as simple to use as Heroku is. Edit: fixed typo.