Kubernetes no thanks. Terraform + Kamal [1] on Digital Ocean is the way I deploy/run apps now.
I don't care about powerful. That's the opposite of what I want. I could just use k8s if I cared about that.
It’s stuff like this that’s just a thousand papercuts that dissuades me from using these “simpler” tools. By the time you’ve rebuilt by hand what you need, you’ve just created a worse version of the “more complex” solution.
I get it if your workload is so simple ir low requirement that zero-downtime deploys, rollbacks, health/liveness, automatic volumes, monitoring etc are features you don’t want or need, but “it’s just as good, just DIY all the things” doesn’t make it a viable alternative in my mind.
I think GP's point was that Kamal has all of these things already, so you don't have to set them up.
Why is this better then Ansible + Docker Compose?
What it provides is a set of conventions based on what most web apps look like.
Eg. built-in proxy with automatic TLS and zero downtime deployments, first-class support for a DB and cache, encrypted secrets, etc.
It’s definitely not for every use case, but for your typical 3-tier monolith on a handful of servers I found it does the job well.
Give me a forum (even Discourse will do) , I'm tired of needing 3rd party spyware to interact with developers. That it is all closed off from search engines makes it even worse