[coreyja]

I am in the exact same boat as you are, and would love some feedback as well! I have been considering Kubernetes so that I can allow horizontal scaling, but haven't done it yet.

For my use case I am VERY well aware that Kubernetes is overkill, but I don't see a great middle ground between Dokku where I am now, and Kubernetes.

[amq]

I have found Docker Swarm Mode to be a good middle ground. Essentially, it's docker-compose which you can run on multiple servers.

[hinkley]

I've started experimenting with Swarm myself but I know one guy who has a histamine reaction every time I mention it. I haven't gotten (or really tried to get) a straight answer out of him about why it's a bad thing.

If you have a countable number of instances of a couple dozen services and one or two "lots of instances" services it seems like it should suffice just fine. And really, my brief sojourn into Kubernetes left me feeling like I bumped into road blocks for anything more complicated than that. Especially with sidecars, or if your tool chain uses multiprocessing instead of threading (Rails, Node, Python?, etc) to deal with concurrency.