I'm building a product with lots of short-lived containers, what should I use?

If you mean many short-lived app instances / jobs / workers, the best fit is usually:

• Kubernetes if you need orchestration, autoscaling, scheduling, service discovery, and you’re running many containers across nodes.
• Docker alone if it’s just local development or a very small setup.
• Serverless containers / jobs if they’re truly short-lived and event-driven:
  • AWS Fargate / ECS
  • Google Cloud Run
  • Azure Container Apps

For lots of short-lived containers, I’d generally recommend Cloud Run or Fargate if you want to avoid managing servers, because they handle scale-to-zero and rapid spin-up well.

If you mean which storage/runtime setting to use for them, some good rules are:

• Keep containers stateless
• Write data to external storage (database, object storage, queue)
• Avoid relying on container filesystem persistence
• Use small images for faster startup
• Add health checks and graceful shutdown

If you tell me:

1. what cloud you’re on,
2. whether these containers are web requests or background jobs,
3. expected scale and startup frequency,

…I can recommend a specific platform.