Hi,

I’ve written some microservices and am looking to deploy them. Since I am not very confident in cloud pricing (= too expensive right now), I am looking into ways of operating a very small server setup.

Lets say I have 5 services, one is the database, 3 should be run as jobs every minute, one service should be scaled based on load.

I am aware that basically described tasks that k8s or nomad would be very good at it. The issue with them is: While I am going to update the services, etc, I do not need a large cluster. I am very sure that I can start with one pod/node and maybe get a second one, if needed.

For this setup, k8s (or other flavors) is just overkill (learning and maintaining it). Nomad from hashicorp looks totally cool for that, but it is recommended to have 3 servers with crazy specs for each of them (doing quorum, leader follower, replication, etc.) Which is overkill when I plan to have 1 worker node in total :D

Nomad has `-dev` option running server and agent on the same node, but in production? I don’t know. Nomads server also uses his ip and other things for identity. When they change, the server instance is basically dead and loses its data. That’s why a quorum of 3 servers is recommended as a minimal prod setup.

Docker compose is not ideal, because I would like to update single containers without tearing everything down.

Also, cron for my periodic tasks is not part of docker or docker swarm except plugins, workarounds, or configuring a container running `cron` but then meddling with `flock`, etc.

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I am aware that it actually does not sound like I need an orchestrator, but monitoring all the jobs and restarting a container manually sounds not optimal for me and maybe there is something out there, that helps me.

Since the tech community knows more than me, I would love to get some other opinions or point of views.

Thanks!

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