A single baremetal server with just docker containers. It's much easier to migrate from just containers running on nodes to an orchestration system (marathon, nomad OR k3s/k8s; there are other options) than to start with the orchestration system.
In my case it's a single bare metal server with KVM guests and ansible.
Docker is on my long term list (maybe) but the current system is fast, stable and requires little intervention so docker would have to offer a massive change not a step change to make it worth it.
I always default to things I know until the benefits are clear and it's worked out well so far.
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.
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.
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.
Docker swarm, Consul+Nomad, AWS Fargate, Azure ACS, Google GCP, etc. Even DC/OS+Marathon is probably simpler. If you really think you need K8s, use a managed service provider like GKE, AKS, or a platform manager like Rancher. You need to pay a specialized company to build and operate it for you, or you aren't going to have a fun time.
I highly recommend leveraging AWS, Google, Azure, etc services. Especially if you're a small business, spending a little for off the shelf tools that someone else operates and supports is going to help you big time.
