[mdm_]

I worked in an academic library where the scale was on the order of hundreds of users per day, but many of those users were faculty/researchers spread out across the globe who got very grumpy when whatever online archive/exhibit was not available.

I migrated our services from a very “pet” oriented architecture to a 4-node Proxmox cluster with Docker Swarm deploying containers across four VMs and it worked great. Services we brought up on this infra still to this date have 100% uptime, through updates and server reboots and other events that formerly would have taken sites offline temporarily.

I looked at k8s briefly and it seemed like total overkill. I probably would have spent weeks or months learning k8s for no appreciable advantage over swarm.