In production it is pretty good without Kubernetes (i.e. using it on elastic beanstalk). One of the biggest reasons for me is that the base instance's only dep

In production it is pretty good without Kubernetes (i.e. using it on elastic beanstalk). One of the biggest reasons for me is that the base instance's only dependency is docker. Without docker you have to install binaries on the main system and hope that virtual environments or something similar exists for the binaries. With Docker I can test the exact code that will run on production and guarantee that with an image hash. when I put an image on elasticbeanstalk, all I have to do is specify the image and the commit hash (built with travis) I want to deploy. If I want to roll back to a previous release by changing the hash. All the instance has to do is pull in docker layers and go. I dont have to worry if package managers are going to fail or a plethora of other things that can go wrong. I think kubernetes is overkill TBH but docker is worth it just to standardize environments between local and prod.