For simple cases I just launch podman containers on long lived hosts with ansible.

You can still add pods if needed and the systemd integration works.

Plus you can actually improve isolation by co-hosting services under separate UIDs.

Like any container it is just co-hosting, and elasticity is a bit slower with autoscaling instances, but it removes most of the complexity of K8s which very few org benefit from or have the culture to support.

Yeah I’ve always meant to check out nomad and never had an opportunity.

Though as I recall, it makes heavy use of consul, which I have used in anger, and makes me a little weary (though that experience is likely very out of date).

It doesn't require Consul IIRC, but bunch of features does depend on it, like service discovery and related stuff. But Nomad is totally usable without Consul for simpler setups.

They’ve now had nomad-native services without consul for a while, including health checks!

Oh neat, wasn't aware! Cheers for providing the update, now if they only could revert the license it might be something one could use again.

I've been using Nomad for years without Consul. Maybe if you complex networking requirements it is worth it, else don't really need it.

Nomad has gained basic service discovery and K/V store without Consul. However, health checking is extremely limited.

As CTO of a small startup and cutting costs, setting up hashicorp nomad + bare metal is a joy to work with.

Some self-reloading HAProxy in nomad to automatically assign URLs to services when needed. Could have used Consul but meh.

Tailscale for private networking.

AWS ECS and GCP Cloud Run are this. Run a container on abstract compute. But they aren't "without all that complexity" because it turns out all that complexity is required for even simple use-cases. Load balancing with SSl certs, cloud API keys, deployment pipelines, sidecars, etc.

Those are hosted services? Completely different class of solution.