I've been using Beanstalk for my new project, which is like an in-between for full on AWS and Heroku, but if you need you can decompose it into individual AWS c

I've been using Beanstalk for my new project, which is like an in-between for full on AWS and Heroku, but if you need you can decompose it into individual AWS components. It's more difficult to get started and there are way less sensible defaults, but I still got everything deployed for my POC in less than 4 hours. As for DBs / engines and such, I try to go for hosted services as long as they're not stupidly priced. I'm currently using Elastic cloud. If I need a relational DB I'll probably deploy Postgres on AWS and install some scripts to back up the data to an S3 bucket every day or so. I chose NOT to use k8s or Docker because, like you said, it's basically a fulltime job to maintain. I don't think it's needed at all unless you're a large organization. So basically: a mixture of roll-your-own, streamlining platforms, and hosted services. Do whatever works and is easiest, and don't worry so much about having ALL the goodies.