I don't think that Kubernetes is the most important thing on prod. Some colleagues from another team at $WORK use plain Docker and "orchestrate" their containers with simple systemd units that run `docker stop|start`. If the app is only a single container, that should do it. (Actually, in that case, I think that `rkt run` would be better since the process runs below the same cgroup, and systemd can detect crashes and restart the container.)

Anyway, Kubernetes is not so important for small deployments, but what I've found really helpful is CoreOS: an auto-updating base OS that gets out of the way and (more importantly) ships a combination of Linux kernel + Docker that usually works really well.

Recent versions of systemd-nspawn can directly download a docker image and run it in a service unit.

What about docker-compose? We've recently started using it, and we don't see any problems; did your colleagues evaluate it?

docker-compose is really straightforward to get running, even moreso with docker-machine, and it gives you dev/prod parity, but the downside is that there's not a built in way to do zero downtime deploys.

Actually with the new docker-compose version 3 you can do rolling updates[1]. 1. https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/#/deploy

That doesn't suggest zero downtime though, no? Still needs an LB to know to stop routing to that host for a moment.

That's how I do deployments, but they take a while to start/stop. Whereas, with uwsgi, for example, deployments are zero-downtime, since uwsgi loads a new interpreter and uses that for new connections from that point on, without interrupting any old connections.