Docker Swarm. After building a whole CD PaaS for ECS, I came to believe that swarm is a much more reasonable place for teams to start, so I built a free tool for deploying single-machine swarms called Rove. Do your own research though, and remember you don't have to use one tool or platform for everything.

> is there any ECS-like hosting that's much cheaper?

Most have adopted EKS-like services i.e. kubernetes.

There is fly.io that's closer. Hope they improve on the reliability aspect.

for compute of containerized payloads, in house servers is a no brainer for cost.

almos zero sysadmin troubles. might even reduce the troubles of working with eks/ecs.

now for storage and db, that's a different story.