[jhspaybar]

I use Convox (http://www.convox.com). It is backed by ECS which gets me out of the infrastructure game for the most part and the CLI interactions in Convox are similar to heroku style commands so the learning curve is much simpler than deploying and learning my own Kubernetes or OpenStack or ECS configurations. They've also thought of the other things you need like environment based secrets(uses DynamoDB and KMS behind the scenes), as well as external load balancing, TLS, RDS integrations and more with single simple commands.

They also have CI/CD out of the box and builds can be triggered in your existing cluster with a 'convox build' or triggered on pushes to your private github repos.

Overall, unless you have a team that actually sees benefit in managing your own container and cluster manager(you better be big), id recommend embracing Convox, or something like it. The complexity still exposed by Kubernetes, OpenStack or ECS is still significant.

[spencerhakim]

Seconding Convox. It's also worth noting that the tooling is open-source, and they profit off an optional-to-use closed-source web interface which has free and paid tiers.

I'm one of two developers at a very young startup, and the one responsible for backend + devops stuff. I simply don't have the time to learn a more complex tool like Kubernetes (not that I didn't consider it) while also working on the actual product. Its simplicity has been a bit limiting on occasion, but they're happy to accept PRs for well thought out changes. I recently had a PR merged regarding UDP ports and ELBs that should make microservice architectures much easier and cheaper to implement.

[wstrange]

If you don't want to manage Kubernetes, you can use Google Container Engine (GKE), which is Kubernetes-as-a-service.

A nice bonus is that they only charge you for the minion nodes. The Kube master is free.

[thesandlord]

The master is free for small clusters (0-5 nodes). After that, you pay for it.

https://cloud.google.com/container-engine/pricing

(I work for Google Cloud)

[jacques_chester]

As I understand it, Convox is closely adapted to AWS. Which, like any closely adapted software, can be great or terrible, according to circumstances.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal on Cloud Foundry, a competing system.

[balsamiq]

We use Convox at Balsamiq as well.