Being able to move fast (ahem, move quickly) is important. I don’t know your exact details but trust that you need this change. Reforming your architecture so

Being able to move fast (ahem, move quickly) is important. I don’t know your exact details but trust that you need this change. Reforming your architecture so that it is reproducible without the overhead of containers, orchestration, etc is definitely possible. What containers enforce upon you is the rigor of reproducibility. If you are disciplined enough to wipe your infrastructure and redeploy using shell scripts instead, you will get the same benefits without the infra overhead (training, bulkiness, etc. — looking at you, Ansible.) Be prepared to implement a fair few things you used to get “for free” though. Also, you must strongly resist the urge to “just quickly implement [feature we used to have with Docker]”. It’s quicker to think your way out of needing the feature than it is to realize how hard it was for Docker to reliably implement it. I recommend at least basing yourself on LXC or LXD, and starting from there. It’s much easier to scriptably reinstall an LXC host than it is to reimage bare metal.