We never bothered to migrate our small setup (circa 20 instances) to containers, we just use VMs. We use Go binaries, so dependencies are compiled in, hosted o

We never bothered to migrate our small setup (circa 20 instances) to containers, we just use VMs. We use Go binaries, so dependencies are compiled in, hosted on VMs on a cloud provider, setup with cloud config, and using systemd to manage services sitting behind a load balancer, one vm per service. Automated test and deploy so it's simple to make updates. Never really felt the need for containers or the extra layer of abstraction and pain it brings. Re hot fixes, automate your deploy process so that it's fast, and you won't mind checking in a fix and then deploying because it should take seconds to do this. You don't need containers to do this. If you can't deploy changes quickly and easily in a reproducible way something is wrong. Having a record of every change and reproducible infrastructure is incredibly important, so we check everything into git then deploy (service config, code changes, data migrations). You don't need containers to get there though, and I'm not really sure they make it easier - perhaps in very big shops they help to standardise setup and infrastructure.