I maintain a free, open source, fast paced shooter that really only works with <100ms pings. To this end I have a dozen servers around the globe. Each server runs a docker-compose with four instances of the game server (each for 24 players), along with some auxiliary services that do things like download updates, upload match demos and statistics.

I frequently need to re-provision new servers and close existing ones.

I've been doing all this with the help of docker-machine (now deprecated), and a collection of handy bash scripts. While this has worked, it's become more and more fragile and I need something better.

For years I've resisted Kubernetes because I keep hearing "premature optimisation", but at this point I'm not sure I have any other options. So before I dive head-long into Kuburnetes by what feels like necessity, how else could I possibly: - Push button provisioning of new hosts across a number of cloud providers - Monitoring so I can restart services under certain conditions. - Notification of failures etc. - Automatic / continuous deployment across all servers and regions.