[luckystartup]

I've worked with a lot of tools. I've decided that I like things that are simple and don't cost much money to get started. For new projects I always start with Heroku, or Parse (on a free back4app plan now).

I love Ansible. Chef is alright. I've been using AWS OpsWorks recently, and it's not bad. Elastic beanstalk is ok, too.

I've spun up some Kubernetes clusters, and it's nice, although I have no need for it yet. I remember the database situation was difficult when I was trying it last year. Something about persistent storage being difficult, so you had to run Postgres on a separate server.

I still like Capistrano. You can automate it with any CI pipeline. For one client, I used the "elbas" [1] gem for autoscaling on AWS. It automatically created new AMIs after deployment. Not super elegant, but it worked fine.

I don't see much of a middle ground between Heroku and Kubernetes. Just start with the one free dyno. Maybe ramp it up to 3 or 4 with hirefire.io. Once you're spending a few hundred per month on Heroku, that's probably the time to spin up a small kubernetes cluster and deploy stuff in containers.

[1] https://github.com/lserman/capistrano-elbas