All of the things you've listed can be done with simple, small, and straightforward scripts. To check for versions of Django, and other libraries, you write si

All of the things you've listed can be done with simple, small, and straightforward scripts. To check for versions of Django, and other libraries, you write simple scripts to test for them. Run them in unit tests, and as a pre-check stage in deployment scripts. Our apps do keep running if any single VM goes down. We don't need Kubernetes or anything to handle that. Just a load balancer and an ElasticSearch cluster. Dev hosts obviously have different passwords read from config files only present in development systems.