Comment by mands

I've found you can get pretty far with a couple of fixed nodes and scaling vertically before bringing in k8s these days.

Right now I'm running,

- podman, with quadlet to orchestrate both single containers and `pods` using their k8s-compatible yaml definition

- systemd for other services - you can control and harden services via systemd pretty well (see https://pyinfra.com/) to manage and provision the VMs and services

- Fedora CoreOS as an immutable base OS with regular automatic updates

All seems to be working really well.