That approach works, but if you are going to go into production with it you might need to support: - Rollbacks - Automatic deployment of new releases from CI,

That approach works, but if you are going to go into production with it you might need to support: - Rollbacks - Automatic deployment of new releases from CI, rolling releases - Healthchecks, detecting if/when the server exits and making sure that VM gets killed - Canary deployments - Autoscaling (could use an autoscaling instance group for it, but what if you need to scale based on other metrics) - Log aggregation - Monitoring - Service discovery, load balancing between services - Service mesh - Fast startup of instances (starting a fresh VM and waiting for it to setup everything from scratch could take ~3-4 minutes, docker is in the ~30s or less range). - Bin-packing (run a high-cpu low-memory workload colocated with a low-cpu high-memory workload for maximum efficiency) etc, etc, all of which you get either out of the box or without a huge amount of work if you adopt something like Google Kubernetes Engine (which takes a few clicks to spin up a cluster). If you don't need any of that stuff and don't want to learn Kubernetes, it's totally justifiable to go that way, but personally I would take Google Kubernetes Engine over something like that any time. There's some up-front cost learning how it works which then pays off very quickly.