> I've containerised a recent Go application I wrote. All it contains is the binary, an assets/ directory for CSS ... So basically you're using docker in place

> I've containerised a recent Go application I wrote. All it contains is the binary, an assets/ directory for CSS ... So basically you're using docker in place of tar here really. Not saying it's not convenient but it doesn't give you anything above the tools we already had before. You create an installation package locally (it could be a deb, a tar file or even just a local directory) and then transfer it to the deployment host. Yes, that's how you do deploy :). You still need the same amount of commands to copy the files into the target file system (in this case docker, but again could be a tar or a local dir). Then you use a command to copy it to the server. Instead of docker push you could use scp (for the tar), or rsync (with the local dir). You can actually just deploy the diff with rsync: it can work with 2 source directories. One would be a remote dir (the current version of the deployment) and the other the local (new version) and it would create a copy of the local/new version based on these transferring just the diff. Whether you want to try a new version of a lib or a new version of your app. It's similar to how I deploy the projects. I use fabric (for copying files and executing remote commands, e.g. for db migration) in place of a makefile, but the idea is the same. Sure, I had to create it once but it's mostly reusable between the projects. > Do you pay per VPS? Sounds expensive. Would it not be cheaper and easier to have a "cluster" of VPS and run Docker on them Again, let's remember the context/use case I'm talking about: a company running their (monolithic) SaaS product. You don't have dozens of low traffic services that you want to host isolated. You have the same app all over your infrastructure with maybe a few services for ops purposes (monitoring, logging, error logging, etc). But you could just buy hosted plans for these. If not, you can stash them onto a few VPSs. Docker or not doesn't matter, whatever the most convenient way to install them. These aren't public facing. So no, it doesn't result in unused/wasted capacity. What you suggest is workable of course, but you may end up with something that is more complex/expensive to operate than going with an existing orchestration solution. (Unless you suggest deploying something simpler than K8s, but still a third party/open source solution.) But even then, it's more complicated than not dealing with containers.