[cetico]

It depends on how you define "most use cases".

If you need containers to solve the "it works on my workstation" problem, and you need to make your containers run in production and scale them easily, and you have lots of applications to setup and deploy, then Kubernetes is fantastic. But if you can get away with just running your application in plain VMs and the burden of maintaining a Consul-based app discovery isn't a problem for you, your proposed setup makes a lot of sense.

Custom infra has an operational cost that is proportional to the number of applications. Kubernetes has a high fixed operational cost that you always incur, whether you have 1 application or 20. Once your operational complexity is high enough, it makes sense to use Kubernetes.

Soon higher level solutions will come along that will delivery the same advantages of Kubernetes but remove the learning curve and ops cost of Kubernetes.

[ownagefool]

The higher level solutions already exist, they're just use kubernetes as a service from one of the providers. Largely, anything simpler would probably just be hiding complexity from you, which probably isn't better.

@OP, I'd probably use GKE.