Email me at jwilson@digitalocean.com if you want to talk specifics and we can work through what a good solution would be.

Unfortunately it sounds like there are two solutions, deploy your own Docker tooling to Droplets (or VMs on any provider) and manually manage your stack, and converting your workload to Kubernetes.

For the former, there is an article on our tutorial site: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-create-a-cluster-of-docker-containers-with-docker-swarm-and-digitalocean-on-ubuntu-16-04

For the latter, there is a great tool here: http://kompose.io/ to convert your workload to Kubernetes.

I too want to stick with DigitalOcean. In our case, since we are only running single-node deployments on Docker Cloud (one node per customer with each node running a single Stack file), we will likely switch to using Docker Machine to provision DigitalOcean hosts, adjust our Stack files to become Compose files, then use Docker Compose to deploy the containers to those hosts.

https://docs.docker.com/machine/examples/ocean/

We’re going to use portainer to manage our docker nodes.
Not completely cover all the features but it is giving us a beter overview of our projects.

We did already migration successfully with swarmpit as management tool. In case of any questions please drop us email here: info@topmonks.com

How and why we setup portainer