Deciding on the right Docker production setup

Because of the bewildering number of choices, picking the right path to deploy your application in production is daunting. You may need to weigh many factors, including the following:

• Setup: How hard is it to go from local development to production?
• Features: Deployment, testing, monitoring, alerting, and cost reporting.
• Cost: Initial and ongoing monthly charges.
• Support: Is support easily available either from vendors or from the community?
• Elasticity: Can it scale out as the load increases, with automatic or manual controls?
• Availability: Can the setup survive the loss of services, hosts, and networks?
• Stickiness: How hard will it be to change the deployment strategy?

Running Docker on a single host is inexpensive and easy to set up but has poor scaling and availability characteristics. All the major cloud orchestration services that support Kubernetes are well-balanced in terms of features and...