• Yes, I guess the rollout will be dev -> Preproduction (environment that equivalent to production) -> Production
• No downtime, but why would that be an issue? I make a deployment, old pod goes down, new pod goes up.
• That is mostly my job. My manager suggested I calculate the cost of moving the containerized services outside the instance and have them run on the cluster in a separate namespace (meaning 1 namespace for every developer).

No gods, no masters!