long run

This is the crux of the problem when losing funding like this

I feel like that’s a lot of assumptions based on OP’s brief, but I don’t disagree with anything you said.

If this causes networking issues, your setup is already too complicated to manage through a flat set of docker containers. That’s not a bad thing, this just isn’t the horse for that course so to speak.

If you’re very concerned just have your prod environment and kick up test services in docker containers and test your tweaks and changes there.

Doing this ad-hoc will be easier and more practical than trying to maintain two full environments like you’re a series B startup finding it’s feet!

They’ve been out of good ideas for years, not sure why they’d start panicking this far into the mediocrity