What I really like are solutions that are simple to both install and maintain.

For example, look at Docker Swarm: https://docs.docker.com/engine/swarm/swarm-tutorial/create-s... or Hashicorp Nomad: https://developer.hashicorp.com/nomad/tutorials/get-started/... or Kubernetes distros like K3s: https://docs.k3s.io/quick-start

Either of those would work better than a bespoke solution a lot of the time, for anyone who is not the original person writing that hodgepodge of shell scripts, because of how much information and documentation exists out there about those solutions.

Either of those would also work better than a very complex Kubernetes cluster that was built with HA in mind and tries to be web scale for anyone who isn't a DevOps engineer that's ready to spend a bunch of time maintaining it, given how complex things can get.

Curiously, a previous article by the author calls out Docker Compose as not being good enough https://www.macchaffee.com/blog/2024/docker-compose/ and also critiques Docker Swarm without much elaboration (because that's not the main focus):

> Single-node only. Many apps never reach a point where they need more than one node, but having to either rip out your entire existing deployment method or invest in Swarm are not good options.

I've seen both Docker Compose and Docker Swarm be used in production with good results - in problem spaces where minutes or hours of downtime (e.g. non-global audience, evenings) was acceptable and having zero downtime deployments wasn't required, though usually there were no big outages anyways. Admittedly, that's a pretty good place to be in, even if not that much interesting happens there.

Just pick whatever fits your requirements, there are also very sane Kubernetes distros out there, even for something like test environments or running locally.

We chose Docker Swarm for a new project that we started two years ago, mostly because our developers liked its learning curve more than k8s's.

We are happily running on Docker Swarm in production now, and don't see that changing in the foreseeable future.