we canned our Kubernetes implementation after actual years of trying to glue together tools at a medium sized company with a small engineering team. we switched to Nomad and are very happy.
I am of the belief that there's an inverse bell curve of support for Kubernetes coming from 1-3 person teams and large companies. either you've got a 1-3 person engineering team who understands the whole thing, or an enterprise that can support it with a team of SREs helping keep the manifests in order. anywhere in between can become chaos quickly if you can't support training your department on it.
Its working pretty well for our 8 person team. We started with ECS, but at some point it wasnt enough, and kubernetes would be too much for our size and expertise (We have around 100 services and do not need autoscaling).
Nomad/Consul/Vault/Fabio are super easy to setup, and its like 10% of the effort of handling your own kubernetes.
Documentation could be worked on, but its getting better.
I honestly don't know why more people don't hear about it and use it. Probably just hasn't hit that "critical mass" yet. I haven't used all of the tools out there, but I've used ECS, K8S and Nomad. Nomad seems to provide the most "efficient use of complexity". What I mean is, for a given increase in complexity, you get more utility out of Nomad than out of the other tools. You don't feel like you're fighting it, or forcing it to do something it wasn't designed for. Even in disaster recover situations, Nomad is surprisingly simple to manage.
It fills another weird niche which is where Kubernetes can't scale _enough,_ especially in large hybrid environments.
We have several thousand hosts in a single cluster across Windows/Linux, all hooked up to Nomad/Consul/Vault and it takes some effort but our team isn't that big and we manage it. With the most recent releases of Nomad and Consul they truly shine at both ends of the spectrum, small/simple and extremely large/extremely complex.