1) Simply put: Because I believe it's the best option both right now and from it's prospect. You might look into mesos(phere) if you want to run other workloads

1) Simply put: Because I believe it's the best option both right now and from it's prospect. You might look into mesos(phere) if you want to run other workloads than containers for which support on mesos is more mature 2) This setup is done from scratch, so given all the constraints this is what I would do. Then again, I'd probably care little about saving a few $$ by using DigitalOcean and look into deploying it on AWS or GCP which is more mature you don't need to use terraform which could be more reliable.. The cluster I describe has 3 nodes, all running controller and worker services. But again: Please don't use this setup 1:1 for production. If you really just want to run a blog and stuff, there are better options.