If you’re interested in something that creates a great developer experience on top of container runtimes but which supports more complex workflows and apps than docker swarm, check out withcoherence.com (I’m a cofounder). We orchestrate containers from dev to prod in your own cloud, without abstracting away what’s happening under the hood, but also without forcing you to deal with all the operational complexity of “doing it right”
> On one end of the spectrum are either neat platforms like Heroku or Vercel or ssh and bear-metal with simple scripts.
> On the other end of the spectrum, we have Kubernetes.
Someone else mentioned Docker Swarm, but allow me to offer my own thoughts.
The simplest option (what you allude to) is probably running containers through the "docker run" command, which can sometimes work for a limited set of circumstances, but doesn't really scale.
For single node setups, Docker Compose can also work really nicely, where you have a description of your entire environment in a YAML file and you can "orchestrate" as many containers as you need, as long as you don't need to scale out.
The aforementioned Docker Swarm is a simple step up that allows you to use the Compose syntax (which is way easier than what K8s would have you use) but orchestrate containers across multiple nodes and also has networking built in. It's simple to set up (already comes preinstalled with Docker), simple to use and maintain (a CLI like that of kubectl, but smaller), the performance and resource usage is small and the feature set is stable. It's an excellent option, as long as you don't need lots of integrations out there and whatever Docker offers is enough.
From there, you might look into the likes of Hashicorp Nomad, though their HCL is a bit more complicated than the Compose format, though still simpler than Kubernetes. The setup is a bit more complicated (if you need Consul and TLS encrypted traffic) but overall it's still just a single binary that can be setup as a client/server depending on your needs. Also, as an added bonus, you can also orchestrate other things than containers, much like how back in the day there was Apache Mesos which supported different types of workloads (e.g. you can launch Java apps or even native processes on nodes that you manage, not just containers).
Of course, even when you get into Kubernetes, there are also projects like K3s and k0s, maybe with tools like Portainer or Rancher, which let you manage it in a simpler manner, either through an easy to use UI or with those K8s distributions being slightly cut down, both in the plugins that they come with, as well as their resulting resource usage and data storage solutions (e.g. use SQLite instead of etcd for smaller deployments).
In my eyes, betting on OCI is a pretty reasonable option and it allows you to run your containers on whatever you need, depending on what your org would be best suited to.
> The skill is not likely to transfer to the next job
I'd argue that if you need to read a book to figure out how services are deployed in any given environment, then you probably should have a DevOps/Ops team and not have to worry about it as a dev. Or, if you're a part of said team, you should still mostly just use OCI containers under the hood and the rest should be much like learning a new programming language for the job (e.g. like going from Java to .NET, which are reasonably similar).
> The ecosystem is not as complete as Kubernetes
Kubernetes largely won the container wars. No other toolchain will ever have as complete of an ecosystem, but at the same time you also dodge the risks of betting on some SaaS solution that will milk your wallet dry with paid tiers and will fold a few years down the line. I'd say that all of the aforementioned technologies support all of the basic concerns (deployments, monitoring, storage, resource limits etc.).
Of course, things might change somewhat in the next years, we have seen both new tooling be developed and become viable, like Lens (https://k8slens.dev/) and some nice CLI tooling, like k9s (https://k9scli.io/), as well as numerous other options.
Though I guess things won't change as much for Docker Swarm (which is feature complete and doesn't have much new stuff be developed for it) or Hashicorp Nomad (because their "HashiStack" covers most of what you need already).
On one end of the spectrum are either neat platforms like Heroku or Vercel or ssh and bear-metal with simple scripts.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have Kubernetes.
Everything in between:
- The learning curve is much steeper than Heroku and Vercel
- The skill is not likely to transfer to the next job
- The ecosystem is not as complete as Kubernetes
Most mid-sized companies went for Kubernetes because the in-betweens are not very optimal and need to take some risks on betting them.