[jadams3]

Started small with k8s / gke, suffered a lot, coming to appreciate it as we grow. I think over the last 1-2 years there weren't a lot of other choices.

Knowing what I know now, I think if you are successful something like k8s is required to scale and you are running non trivial apps. For trivial stuff I'd go serverless plus some kind of managed app platform as much as possible.

For non trivial, there are stripped down k8s distributions out there that would work and let you work in portable containers. I'd think pretty hard about something like Rancher to get started, and 'graduate' to GKE / EKS / AKS when you hit scale with at least 100's of VM's. You need to keep it in containers to plausibly make the switch though and not require a rewrite later. I think Rancher deploys on all the major and smaller cloud vendors, is small enough to run on your desktop, still do development, and adheres to the API standards you'll care about later.