[physicles]

> Do you have a need to spin up a partial subgraph of microservices, and have them talk to each other while developing against a slice of the full stack?

Yeah we do. We use k3s, and use kustomize to scale down or disable services from prod. minio replaces S3, postgres runs nicely in a container, environment variables for service discovery. Add in a liberal sprinkling of NodePort services to allow connections from web browsers or whatever.

Been using it for about three years now. Works great. Upgrading is easy, rebuilding is easy.

We even use it to run our one-box testing environment on an EC2 instance, rather than spinning up an actual EKS cluster. Also works great.

I love that we use the exact same tools to manage all environments -- yaml+kustomize for manifests, kubectl+k9s for ops -- so we get really used to using them.