Typically the pre-packaged tools don't give you enough control. They are an abstraction with no lower level to fall back on when you want to do something outsid

Typically the pre-packaged tools don't give you enough control. They are an abstraction with no lower level to fall back on when you want to do something outside of whatever use case they are trying to solve. Kubernetes is sort of the opposite case. Personally, I think Docker Swarm is the best option at this point. The API is simple in comparison to Kubernetes and works well. One thing that I've found that Kubernetes and Docker Swarm are missing that some pre-packaged options have is a load balancer / reverse proxy, but Traefik has grown into a very nice solution. I think pre-packaged solutions to can still add a lot of value by doing things like autoscaling, simplifying blue-green deployments, etc, but I personally find some of the limitations frustrating.