Godspeed. I hope the transition goes well. If you need to baby step towards it, I felt like docker swarm was easier to approach but kubernetes is far more standard. I recommend budgeting training into the rollout if your shop can afford it. For CI/CD I recently had a great experience with github and github actions but I had a coworker setup on-premise gitlab in the past too.

Somewhat of a tangent - My experience with alembic of over four years is that it is leagues better than manual SQL dealings, and also very easy to understand what you're looking at. But I have to say that when I used sequelize in NodeJS, it has an autosync and autoupgrade schema that made alembic look silly.

In regards to my own post I think for now what I'm mostly seeing is that for each new deployment - is going to have to have an internal smoke test, then staggered rollout of updates.