I thought k8s might be a solution so I decided to learn through doing. It quickly became obvious that we didn't need 90% of its capabilities but more important it'd put undue load/training on the rest of the team. It would be a lot more sensible to write custom orchestration using the docker API - that was straightforward.

Experimenting with k8s was very much worthwhile. It's an amazing thing and was in many ways inspirational. But using it would have been swimming against the tide so to speak. So sure I built a mini-k8s-lite, it's better for us, it fits better than wrapping docker compose.

My only doubt is whether I should have used podman instead but at the time podman seemed to be in an odd place (3-4 years ago now). Though it'd be quite easy to switch now it hardly seems worthwhile.