Imo Docker doesn't have too high a learning curve at the start. It's just when you move up to docker compose, Kubernetes that it can be overwhelming. My opinio

Imo Docker doesn't have too high a learning curve at the start. It's just when you move up to docker compose, Kubernetes that it can be overwhelming. My opinion is that when you're starting out, just go with a PaaS like Heroku. You can simply maintain a separate dev/prod branch and it'll automatically update the server. All the issues you mentioned can be solved it just takes some investment somewhere (time if you do it today yourself / money to pay a PaaS or someone else to do it). We personally use Kubernetes to solve these issues since we get stateless builds and simply have environment variables that change things like database connections, api keys, etc between our various environments. But again this took a few weeks to setup.