One nice thing about Beanstalk was that you didn't (don't) have to deal with containers on the toolchain at all. You basically zip the directory structure you'd

One nice thing about Beanstalk was that you didn't (don't) have to deal with containers on the toolchain at all. You basically zip the directory structure you'd normally serve and it just gets rolled out to all the instances. What I figured out early (the hard way) was that it wasn't worth the time trying to screw around with leader instances that installed and ran cron jobs or anything like that. I just have an little separate ec2 instance that acts as a heartbeat for cleaning up the DB and buckets, rather than trying to get Beanstalk to do that consistently. I think it's extremely well suited for one layer, the API; and counterintuitively I find it easier not to containerize that, because it gives me more flexibility to switch DBs or storage engines without touching the API, and without having to rework a container and redeploy the API itself.