I am running a 18 node SOA since 4 years with pm2 and I am very happy. Very reliable. No need for the complexity of Kubernetes or even Mesosphere DCOS back in the day. I do not even consider to change anything.
All on a single host, or is this spread across multiple servers? Curious about how people run it with the latter approach if they do
Actually on 3 hosts, but only the primary is at the edge, one other is a hot-standby at another geographic location and the third is for incremental backup purposes via ZFS. The database sync connection are tunneled via Wireguard. Failover to the hot-standby is done via DNS (ClouDNS).
Also I run the setup in a Linux Container (LXC).
Deployment is done via SCP and Tar. :-D
This setup is very reliable to me and at the other hand cheap!