Reproducibility is great. I would probably employ Docker for that if that were my role. However, this is completely from my own limited personal experience: I've worked with multiple devops people at earlier stage companies who have harped on about how we needed to focus on potential future scale when the company had hardly any customers. This was detrimental to our ability as programmers to understand the domain and requirements due to everything being so much harder to implement and test. It's not that I didn't try. I am also not convinced you need to worry too much about things like load balancing in the beginning. In these contexts, I never saw Kubernetes being used for reproducibility alone.