[MediumD]

If you need to distribute containers on a handful of nodes, kubernetes is great (and far better than Docker swarm imho). However, most small businesses probably don't need to have a microservice setup and can simply deploy a simple monolith while they focus on getting their business off the ground.

[rhizome31]

Thank you. I was thinking that maybe swarm mode would be simpler to set up and maintain.

Just to give more context, our use case is spawning Jupyter notebook in containers using JupyterHub and DockerSpawner so that each data scientist gets a personal ready-to-use environment to work with. With 4 data scientists we're beginning to reach the limits of the largest instance provided by our cloud provider and we're expecting to have more users soon. Actually our current cloud provider has just released a managed k8s service so that might be the way to go.

[MediumD]

Gotcha. Yeah, I would much rather use a managed k8s service over deploying and maintaining my own. GCP's GKE has been great for us so far and very reasonably priced.