I ditched Docker for Podman

I may be the odd man out, but after getting unbelievably stressed out by containers, k8s, etc., I couldn't believe how zen just spinning up a new VPS and bootstrapping it with a bash script was. That combined with systemd scripts can get you relatively far without all of the (cognitive) overhead.

The best part? Whenever there's an "uh oh," you just SSH in to a box, patch it, and carry on about your business.

Containers and container orchestrators are complex tools. The constant cost of using them is pretty high compared to bash scripts. However the scale / maintenance factor is significantly lower, so for a 100 boxes simplicity of bash scripts might still win out over the containers. At 1000 machines it is highly likely that simplest and least maintenance overall solution will be using an orchestrator.

That's what I found out, though: the footprint doesn't matter. I did have to write a simple orchestration system, but it's literally just me provisioning a VPS, bootstrapping it with deps, and pulling the code/installing its dependencies. Short of service or hardware limits, this can work for an unlimited number of servers.

I get the why most people think they need containers, but it really seems only suited for hyper-complex (ironically, Google) deployments with thousands of developers pushing code simultaneously.