> I think there is a real hole in the market for a simple solution that lets you deploy some containers to some instances in a declarative fashion without all of that complexity and does decent LTS versions

Hashicorp's Nomad basically is just that, supports various way of running stuff too which is neat. Shame about the license change which basically killed all my interest in it, so seems the hole is indeed still unfilled.

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heavy use of consul, which I have used in anger, and makes me a little weary (though that experience is likely very out of date).

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.