Podman + systemd and manual deployments have been _fine_ for my business, but I want to be able to run better stuff and offer better guarantees. Mostly so I don't have to be available 24/7 worrying if a service has downtime. Kubes is just too much for me right now and my infra is apparently too complicated to get what I want out of it.
I mostly use just this nowadays:
https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-quadlet.1.html
Because at home I typically don't have multiple nodes.
That's just FYI, that very simple setup can be achieved with just systemd.
At work I used pacemaker and It's great.
Discussion
have you got hands on quadlets? I like how simple it is (It's just systemd templating, so elegant)
I have not. The docs (or lacktherof) keep scaring me off. I've really liked compose for the easy of control and yaml I guess. Pacemaker has a built-in integration for compose that is working okay so far. It's an easy transition.
Probably still worth learning, but not sure how well I can integrate it into a multi-node cluster. It does appear that pacemaker seems to replicate unit files but I'm not fully sure.