A Heroku alternative built on Kubernetes!? If I need to know what Kubernetes is, Helm charts and whatnot, it's not really a Heroku alternative for me. I understand for some, managing them as basic as running "echo hello", but I don't want to even think about kubernetes and helm charts when I want something up and running very quickly.

Yeah that was the goal of Canine -- to never have to know that Kubernetes exists, but to still take advantage of its mature ecosystem. And then one day down the line, if you ever do need more powerful features, exposing the Kubernetes API's directly.