AWS Fargate, Azure Container Instances, GCP Serverless Containers (private beta). All the clouds have something to offer now, but you can also look at Kubernetes which can also run a single container very easily and has managed offerings everywhere.
AWS Fargate may be interesting as you can use containers but don’t need to manage VMs. There is support for scheduled tasks as well. I’d consider looking for convenience CLIs or wrappers on top.
Google or Amazon will both give you PaaS systems where you can run pretty much anything. I have more experience with kubernetes than AWS Container Engine.
Openshift and Cloudfoundry should give you alternative PaaS type systems which in arguably are less versatile but more complete.
Comparing to a self-hosted PaaS is fair for the open source containership project.
It has built in high availability, automatic clustering of nodes, loadbalancing, service discovery, persistent data management, internal DNS, and support for easily extending the core of the system with plugins (plus more).
Of your examples I would say it is most like Openshift Origin.
Dokku being mainly aimed at people running a single standalone server.
ContainerShip Cloud (https://cloud.containership.io) is a hosted service that lets you launch and scale ContainerShip clusters with a click across multiple providers. You can backup clusters, share them, and move them between clouds.
For web services, I would recommend Google cloud run, Azure container instances, or AWS Fargate for running containers directly. In most cases the price per service would be much lower than 5$/month - https://ashishb.net/tech/how-to-deploy-side-projects-as-web-...
There are big players such as AWS/GCP who have hosted instances. Smaller companies such as aiven.io offer more dedicated services and are pretty awesome.
I would suggest anything serverless in most cases. Cheapest is not a great measure. Azure and GCP have good options. Cloudflare too if you just want to do something simple.
Just start with a VM or dedicated server until you have scale that matters. Focus on product.
If you want an early head start with something like containers, then Kubernetes is nice and 1.4 has some good features to make it easy to scale across clouds/on-prem/colo in the future.
kubernetes, python, riak. certainly myriad options at each of those tiers which are OSS, easily deployable on cloud/on-premise, and well understood. If those things are a challenge for your org, I'd recommend that a Cloud provider might be the way to go!
I have only ever used AWS, what is the go to cloud provider these days? I know GCP and Azure are catching up, but are people just going back to renting some boxes in a data center and just hosting their stuff on there?
Pretty much everything you need to do today is done. Multitenancy was designed in from the start and is available in several levels of hardness (orgs/spaces gives you user-level multitenancy, isolation segments give you component-level multitenancy, multi-foundation gives you the equivalent of multi-cluster multitenancy).
As time goes on it will adopt more and more of Kubernetes, Istio and other systems as they emerge and become able to take over from its own original components. But you'll get the same experience throughout. And Kubernetes will converge upwards as people realise that "It Just Works" is actually, you know, a pretty nice developer experience.
But I am, having worked on and around Cloud Foundry for several years, hilariously biased.
I don't think you've shared sufficient information about your requirements to give you a good suggestion.
If you're already running container workloads, DigitalOcean has a managed Kubernetes offering that's quite decent. If you're only using VMs so far, I don't think you'll gain anything by introducing the complexity of the bigger cloud providers (managing VPC, subnets, firewalling).
Of course you can use a cloud provider and just stick with a common stack that can be easily moved to different providers or hosted on metal/on-prem once the need arises.
In order to provide a more useful answer, I'd like to know your current tech stack and a rough estimate of traffic/users.
I've done consulting for various clients who wanted to move from on-prem to cloud and vice versa and as long as you stay clear of the proprietary products you shouldn't worry that much about cloud lock-in. Stick with Postgres/MySQL, redis, containers/VMs and try to have as much of your infra in code, if possible.
It won't be so straightforward because each cloud vendor has multiple offerings catering to how much control you want over your compute. The easiest is Serverless (Cloud functions, lambda), then there is managed Kubernetes offerings (which will standardize your experience over all vendors and on-prem infra), third is opinionated PaaS (App Engine, Beanstalk, Heroku) and last one is empty VMs (Compute Engine, EC2) which is very similar to your current experience.
What are you using for the server resource provisioning for your hosted service? Firecracker on KVM? Current services like AWS Fargate/Lightsail containers/Google Cloud run are not competitive pricing wise for dynamic container spawning at scale unless you provision ahead of time. For this sort of services, your managed solution needs to be competitive with e.g. raw compute providers like DigitalOcean and Hetzner.
Cloud Run is a perfectly reasonable choice for hosting websites -- it's a serverless HTTP platform that uses containers as the base packaging and runtime infrastructure.
Unlike something like Fargate, it supports automatic scaling of containers based on requests, so it will run zero containers if you get no traffic, and 100 containers if you get (for example) 1500 requests per sec. The fully-managed version has a pay-per-100ms of execution model, while the GKE-hosted version uses an existing GKE cluster you provide.
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