It's a pity that docker swarm did not make it. It wasn't perfect but it was a lot simpler to setup and manage than kubernetes.

If you can get away with it, vanilla docker hosts running docker compose provide most of the same benefits with a fraction of the cost. For most startups, that's a great way to avoid getting sucked into a black hole of non value adding devops activity. You lose some flexibility but vanilla ubuntu hosts with vanilla docker installs are easy to setup and manage. We used packer and ansible to build amis for this a few years ago with some very minimal scripts for container deploys.