[jazoom]

This is not necessarily true. I learned Kubernetes and converted a complex network of services over from Docker about a year ago. It took me about a month. I barely have to do anything for ongoing maintenance. It's taking up less of my time than Docker Swarm did, and Swarm took up less of my time than the Ansible mess I had before that. More stuff is automated (e.g. by using k8s cron jobs). The scheduler is pretty good now and handles almost all situations by itself.

As a sole developer, I couldn't run what I do WITHOUT such an orchestration platform.

And yes, I administer my own cluster on a bunch of Vultr VMs. I've had fewer problems with this over the last 3 years than it seems people have had on GCS (recent news of outage fresh in memory).

[fredsir]

What are you using to orchestrate the VMs? (provisioning new VMs, taking down VMs and so on)

[jazoom]

Nothing. Occasionally I upgrade the specs on one of the machines (vertical scaling) with one click. I'm not so bothered about having a bit of extra capacity since the VMs are so much cheaper than on GCS/AWS/Azure.

Eventually I might want to add more machines to the cluster. That would take me a few minutes. I use sup scripts to do the setup. I like it much better than Ansible.

https://github.com/pressly/sup