Forte, a digital freight company, initially used Heroku due to its ease of use and the value placed on engineers' time. However, as their team grew and the application became more complex, they faced issues with autonomy and configuration management. The company realized they needed to switch to Kubernetes to address these challenges and planned a gradual migration process. They introduced Dockerization, standardized tools and patterns, and hired an SRE team to manage configuration management and secrets. Forto's key learnings from the migration include understanding the business domain and relating infrastructure choices to company goals, and leveraging commercial tools such as Humanitec for internal developer platforms. The company aims to expand their Kubernetes setup to multiple regions, implement audited escalations for engineers, and move towards a passwordless architecture.