On mobile so I’m not going to get into the weeds too much but I do have a couple questions that might help you make a decision:
- Do you have a “staging” or “testing” environment where things are deployed first before they go to prod? If so it might not be a huge deal to have the dev’s individual environments not be exactly what prod looks like
- Are you actually in an HA type scenario where you expect updates to not actually cause downtime? If you can tolerate the odd 2-5 minutes of downtime now and then during releases then you don’t need to go that crazy making sure all your pod deployment strategies are exactly perfect. That means you can probably tolerate more divergence between dev and prod
- Are the devs expected to get all their containerization stuff exactly right before going to prod? Or is that mostly your job? If the expectation is on then they need the tools to test their stuff. If it’s on you then you just need to figure out what you need to accomplish that.
Anyways, welcome to the k8s admin club and may whatever god you believe in have mercy on your soul.