Eh, you can easily deploy containers to EC2/GCE and have an autoscaling group/MIG with healthchecks. That's what I'd be doing for a first pass or if I had a monolith (a lot of business is still deploying a big ball of PHP). K8s really comes into its own once you're running lots of heterogeneous stuff all built by different teams. Software reflects organizational structure so if you don't have a centralized infra team you likely don't want container orchestration since it's basically your own cloud.

By containers on EC2 you mean installing docker on AMI's? How do you deploy them?

I really do think Google Cloud Run/Azure Container Apps (and then in AWS-land ECS-on-fargate) is the right solution _especially_ in that case - you just shove a container on and tell it the resources you need and you're done.

From https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24418815/how-do-i-instal... , here's an example that you can just paste into your load balancing LaunchConfig and never have to log into an instance at all (just add your own runcmd: section -- and, hey, it's even YAML like everyone loves)

  #cloud-config
  
  apt:
    sources:
      docker.list:
        source: deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu $RELEASE stable
        keyid: 9DC858229FC7DD38854AE2D88D81803C0EBFCD88
  
  packages:
    - docker-ce
    - docker-ce-cli

Sure you can use an AWS ASG, but I assume you also tie that into an AWS AlB/NLB. Then you use ACM for certs and now you are locked in to AWS times 3.

Instead you can do those 3 and more in k8s and it would be the same manifests regardless which k8s cluster you deploy to, EKS, AKS, GKE, on prem, etc.

Plus you don't get service discovery across VMs, you don't get a CSI so good luck if your app is stateful. How do you handle secrets, configs? How do you deploy everything, Ansible, Chef? The list goes on and on.

If your app is simple sure, I haven't seen simple app in years.

I've never worked anywhere that has benefitted from avoiding lock-in. We would have saved thousands in dev-hours if we just used an ALB instead of tweaking nginx and/or caddy.

Also, if you can't convert an ALB into an Azure Load balancer, then you probably have no business doing any sort of software development.

I don't disagree about avoiding lock-in, and I'm sure it was hyperbole, but if you really spent thousands of dev-hours (approx 1 year) on tweaking nginx, you needed different devs ;)

ALB costs get very steep very quickly too, but you're right - start with ALB and then migrate to nginx when costs get too high

Second paragraph is totally right - start with an ALB and move when you need it. At the point you are running into issues with either perf or cost of your ALB you have good problems.

I did this. It’s not easier than k8s, GKE, EKS, etc…. It’s harder cause you have to roll it yourself.

If you do this just use GKE autopilot. It’s cheaper and done for you.