[kawsper]

We're 1.5 people to do ops works, but no one is full time on it, I'm the main responsible and I have someone that helps me when he's interested. We are 5 developers.

Our whole platform is between 10-50 EC2 machines running a Nomad cluster, Nomad manages our Docker containers and with services backed by RDS.

I think managed services were in their infancy when we did our initial research back in 2017/2018, Tectonic+Kubernetes with CoreOS looked promising but they were bought by Red Hat and probably rebranded/merged/disappeared into OpenShift. EKS was in beta an only available in the US (we're in EU).

We did try Rancher but we hit issues with it.

I don't know if K3S existed yet, but just looking at the diagram on their website it does look quite interesting.

We launched Consul first and started defining all of our services, and after that we started moving applications into Nomad.

HA has been quite easy with Terraform on EC2. We build "golden-images" with Packer, and then launch them with Terraform, upgrading Consul is adding 3 new servers, making sure things are stable, and then removing the 3 old servers.