You probably are aware, but AWS has a container orchestration service built into the platform with ECS. The container agent is open source (https://github.com/aws/amazon-ecs-agent).

We're building an open-source platform at Convox that leverages ECS very successfully. https://github.com/convox/rack

In my experience, ECS is easy to run, as it's a first class part of the platform. Boot up the right "cattle" AMIs with the right ASG configuration and you're good to go.

K8, Docker Swarm, Mesos and Nomad have plenty of documented success but you to stand up and operate the orchestration layer yourself. This is booting up "pet" AMIs and making sure they are monitored, etc. Then you boot up your "cattle" AMIs to run your apps.

The Convox philosophy is that you get application portability by packaging your app correctly with Docker. The orchestration layer should be invisible, something that you shouldn't build or operate yourself.

We run Rancher[1], which is open source, across multiple AWS regions using a single ELB endpoint for container orchestration into different environments. You can use the stock AWS AMIs for the instances and Rancher also provides RancherOS AMIs that work extremely well.

Rancher also has k8s as an option and makes deploying it much easier.

1. http://rancher.com/

There are other open source container frameworks, we are using Aurora (http://aurora.apache.org/) but there is also Mesosphere (https://mesosphere.com/) and some other smaller ones...

There are plenty of others which are open source. Nomad is one such example.