I think one of the powerful things that something like containers offer is a happy path that's also the easy path path and it meshes well with the principles yo

I think one of the powerful things that something like containers offer is a happy path that's also the easy path path and it meshes well with the principles you need for a scalable or micro-service infrastructure. With "real" servers you can build infrastructure that operates and scales in similar ways but the happy path isn't as clear or enforced. Containers make you think about persistence and state as being distinct from your compute at/near the beginning. You're punished for not doing so fairly early, even on your local machine. Your AWS instance can go away but months down the line you're not wondering what you did wrong, you're wondering what Amazon or your ops team did wrong. So the happy path that was easier to deviate from before becomes much harder with containers. It's also easier and faster to update a container image than servers. With something like Kubernetes you can even do it in stages. Yes, you still have to keep the underlying servers updated but they just need to run containers. No testing dependencies and prerequisites. And that decoupling of the app runtime makes updating the servers themselves easier. You can create a new machine image and replace outdated ones trivially.