I don't understand your puppet comment, but then I have never used it. I had some experience with Chef, lots of experience with shell scripts to config servers

I don't understand your puppet comment, but then I have never used it. I had some experience with Chef, lots of experience with shell scripts to config servers from scratch. But now I use Ansible instead. Technically I still run a shell script to call AWS CLI and launch an instance, but then I do everything else with an Ansible playbook that configures the server, installs a specific version of PostgreSQL, adds some extras like server extensions and a performance reporting tool. This is what set up our current production and dev servers, and from time to time I use it to set up yet another server to test something like adding a language extension, before running it against the dev server. And as I mentioned, I also use Docker for other servers. My experience is that using Docker to set up a server is usually the same amount of work as Ansible. But Ansible is more amenable to refactoring into reusable components, i.e. components of the build/config process.