Every version of the design system stays running

Your component library is on v14. Three product teams are on v9, v11, and v12, and their designers keep asking what a button looked like "before the radius change."

Every release gets a snapshot-cloned container running that version's Storybook, with an alias: ds-v9, ds-v11, ds-v14. Fourteen containers, fourteen URLs, one $29 box. The old ones sit idle; cloned from one base they share disk blocks copy-on-write, the kernel caches their identical binaries once, and an idle Storybook burns no CPU. Keeping v3 around costs about what not keeping it costs.

A designer opens ds-v9 and ds-v14 side by side and sees the migration. Nobody checks out a tag and runs npm install on a Friday.