End of an era... Are there any viable alternatives to Kubernetes and Nomad?
For over 90% of workloads kubernetes is an overkill. Only when company is reaching google scale kubernetes make sense. A good alternative to kubernetes is LXD [1] or just stick with docker compose. Kubernetes except for managed services from cloud providers is more difficult than an average application to manage and a huge cost in itself to run and maintain. [1] https://www.linuxcontainers.org/
I'd imagine most small to medium companies would be running things on a cloud service using managed kubernetes. It seems mostly larger companies that are sticking with non-cloud hardware and services.
The advantage of kubernetes in that case is that there is a large ecosystem of helm charts, guides, documentation, etc. Deploying something new from scratch is fairly easy since someone else has done all the leg work and packaged it all up.