But what do you use to manage those containers and surrounding infra (networking, proxies, etc)?
I've been down the route of using Puppet for managing Docker containers on existing systems, Ansible, Terraform, Nomad/Consul. But in the end it all is just tying different solutions together to make it work.
Kubernetes (in the form of K3s or a other lightweight implementation) just works for me, even in a single server setup. I barely have to worry about the OS layer, I just flash K3s to a disk and only have to talk to the Kubernetes API to apply declarative configurations.
Only things I'm sometimes still need the OS layer for is networking, firewall or hardening of the base OS. But that configuration is mostly static anyways and I'm sure I will fine some operators for that to manage then through the Kubernetes API as IaC if I really need to.
I used to have a bunch of bash scripts for bootstrapping my docker containers. At one point I even made init scripts, but that was never fully successful.
And then one day I decided to set up kubernetes as a learning experiment. There is definitely some learning curve about making sure I understood what deployment, or replicaset or service or pod or ingress was, and how to properly set them up for my environment. But now that I have that, adding a new app to my cluster, and making it accessible is super low effort. i have previous yaml files to base my new app's config on.
It feels like the only reason not to use it would be learning curve and initial setup... but after I overcame the curve, it's been a much better experience than trying to orchestrate containers by hand.
Perhaps this is all doable without kubernetes, and there is a learning curve, but it's far from the complicated nightmare beast everyone makes it out to be (from the user side, maybe from the implementation details side)
