[sofixa]

> That these days there are only two serious choices: deploy on a single-node Docker/podman machine, or Kubernetes.

I disagree - there's cloud PaaSes like Fargate or Cloud Run, or when self-managing, a third option which is much less known but quite easier while also being more flexible - HashiCorp Nomad. Disclaimer time: I work at HashiCorp, but I've had this opinion for years before joining - https://atodorov.me/2021/02/27/why-you-should-take-a-look-at... (it's out of date, but the principles still apply, just to a different extent, Nomad having gotten easier). All opinions are my own etc.

Not FOSS anymore, but free and source available, composable, and does a big portion of what Kubernetes does at a fraction of the complexity. I ran it in production for a few years and everything was a breeze, unlike the Kubernetes clusters I was maintaining at the same time. You get all the "basics" of HA, failover, health checks, easy ingress, advanced deployment types, basic secrets storage, etc. without having to write thousands of lines of YAML, and with simple upgrades and close to no maintenance.

> Also, I seem to be an outlier, judging from the rest of the comments, by running on dedicated servers. These days everybody is using one of the clouds and terribly afraid of managing servers. I think it's going to be hard to make DevOps better when everyone is in the "loving" Azure/AWS/GCP embrace: you're basically positioning as their competitor, as the cloud vendor itself is always trying to upsell its customers and reduce friction to as close to zero as possible.

Because running on dedicated servers means you spend time on managing them which could be more productively spent working on whatever your product is. Don't get me wrong, I love that stuff, but it's like when I started my blog - I spent weeks on CI/CD, a nice theme, a fancy static site generator, all sorts of optimisations, choosing a good hosting provider etc. etc. etc.... instead of actually doing what I was supposed to, writing content. When you manage your own servers your costs might even be higher compared to a F/C/P aaS from a cloud provider, especially with free trial year/free tier/startup credits. As long as you keep an eye on not locking yourself in, you could easily migrate most products to self-managed dedicated servers if performance/costs require it.

[sph]

This is silly but I will not use any Hashicorp product ever again, for two reasons: one is Terraform (it is a bad product with a bad DSL), the second is that I bought one service from them that advertised a clear 30-day money back guarantee, found a bug in one hour of running, a multiple-year old Github issue they had been ignoring, and to make it worse, they completely ghosted me when I went to ask for a refund. Both on Twitter and via email.

So, I don't really care to try out Nomad for my business, honestly.

[sofixa]

Nah, it's not silly - you had bad experiences with a company, it's normal not to want to interact with them further. I'm personally not a fan of Microsoft because I spent my formative tech years installing Windows on family friends' PCs and had so much inconsistencies and issues that I have a very negative association with Windows and Microsoft.

I disagree with the DSL part, but it's in big part subjective so people have all sorts of different experiences and opinions.

[icedchai]

Terraform may seem bad, but cloud-specific solutions like Cloud Formation are even worse...