Kubernetes alternatives for small teams - is K8s overkill?

We are a team of 4 and tried Kubernetes - it was definitely overkill for us. We switched to AWS ECS with Fargate and it has been great.

Pros of Fargate: No cluster management, automatic scaling, pay per use, integrates with ALB for zero-downtime deployments. Setting up a new service takes minutes, not hours.

Cons: Vendor lock-in, cold start times can be noticeable, slightly higher cost than running your own EC2 instances.

For 8 microservices with a small team, I would strongly recommend a managed service. You should be writing code, not managing infrastructure.

Have a look at Nomad by HashiCorp. It is significantly simpler than Kubernetes while still providing scheduling, service discovery, and rolling deployments.

We run 15 services on Nomad with just 3 servers and it has been rock solid. The configuration is straightforward HCL (same as Terraform) and the learning curve is much gentler than K8s. You can also mix container and non-container workloads easily.