This is the sort of thing that I think a containerised deployment platform can really help with, and I'm doing much the same – specifically because it completel

This is the sort of thing that I think a containerised deployment platform can really help with, and I'm doing much the same – specifically because it completely avoids interactions between applications' environments. But I would recommend looking at the Hashicorp stack as a possible alternative, which might be entirely suitable for your use-case without the complexity of Kubernetes. This involves running Nomad and Consul to provide cluster scheduling and service discovery respectively - these are both single binaries with minimal configuration. Then you'd need some kind of front-end load-balancer like nginx or traefik which uses Consul to decide where to route requests. It doesn't cover all the use-cases and features that Kubernetes does, but it does have the benefit of being much more straightforward to work with, so definitely worth considering!