No. I didn’t mean to attack you in particular in any way. I apologize if it came off as such. I just dislike the blind copying of what Google and Facebook do. Docker is another atrocity that everyone seems to feel obligated to use.
Heroku supports moderately large amounts of requests. It’s less expensive than having a proper sysops team in most cases.
With 1,400 it’s probably worth it to move away from AWS. Something like self-hosted Triton (descendant of Solaris) cluster would be far more elegant than kube and lxc.
Triton and SmartOS are still Sun Microsystems people. Solaris zones preceded Linux containers by almost a decade. They lost the popularity contest, so they have to provide compatibility with kube and docker. I think infrastructure containers are zones with extra whistles.
For even better performance, I’d go with Xen and Linux unikernel. The startup time can be just 1s with such minimum overhead. It also greatly reduces the attack surface. I highly doubt you’ll be allowed for such a drastic change though.