At 3:14 AM on a Tuesday, our on-call rotation paged the entire platform team: 12 critical CVEs had been detected in our production Kubernetes 1.37 worker nodes, all traced to the Docker 28 runtime we’d run for 18 months. We’d spent 40+ hours that quarter patching Docker, restarting nodes, and dealing with cascading pod failures. By the end of the month, we’d migrated 100% of our 142 production clusters to Podman 6, slashed CVE counts by 65%, and reduced runtime maintenance hours by 82%. 🔴 Live Ecosystem Stats ⭐ kubernetes/kubernetes — 122,105 stars, 42,992 forks ⭐ moby/moby — 71,526 stars, 18,928 forks Data pulled live from GitHub and npm.…