HACKER Q&A
📣 tontony

If not Kubernetes, what do you use to run your apps?


Kubernetes is everywhere these days, and it might feel like there are very few alternatives to it when you need a simpler sort of self-hosted platform to run your apps/workloads (not talking right now about PaaS options like Heroku, Render, etc.)

- What do people use for single-server app management?

- For multi-node setups, is anyone using Docker Swarm, Nomad, or any other tool that is outside the Kubernetes ecosystem?

  👤 lylo Accepted Answer ✓
I have a single server running https://pagecord.com. I use Hatchbox on a Hetzner server. I wrote a bit about it here:

https://olly.pagecord.com/migrating-the-pagecord-rails-app-f...

I have plenty of paying customers but I still think K8s would be complete overkill at this stage.

👤 adamcharnock
For deployment to a single-server I would certainly reach for Ansible as a starting point. Using that I would probably configure systemd units on Debian.

Speaking off-the-cuff (so don't hold me to this):

If you need multi-node for (fairly good but not amazing) reliability, then the easiest first step would be a cloud instance, rather than bare-metal server. Given live migration, they are effectively multi-node.

If you need multi-node for performance, then get a single dedicated bare-metal server. They can pack a huge punch while being cost effective. And you'll likely get 100% uptime in a good year.

If you need multi-node for reliability & performance, then kubernetes.

👤 SamInTheShell
Kubernetes just kinda won the container orchestration war against swarm, nomad, and mesos. It is quite an improvement over working with those orchestrators.

My strategy involves building stateless apps with distributed services that have good support in Kubernetes like Yugabyte and Minio.

What I do is host the thing on a cheap cloud server until it grows enough to need HA or scaling. At that point I move my workloads into a cluster.

I already have everything patterned out though so, I’m living in some sunk costs if anything newer or truly better comes along.

👤 czhu12
We open sources https://canine.sh for this reason!

It basically lets you keep the good parts of kubernetes, but not suffer any of the complexities

Use it at work, because we wanted the Heroku experience, without the prices.

👤 flybayer
ECS is great and simpler than k8s. Flightcontrol[1] is an easy way to spin up and deploy to ECS clusters. (I'm a cofounder)

[1] https://www.flightcontrol.dev/

👤 mmarian
Self-host CapRover (Docker Swarm overlay) on a $7/month Hetzner VPS. Use it to deploy 4-5 apps, on the same VM.
👤 cranberryturkey
i just use a dedi