Yikes... it sounds like a lot of people answering this post haven't ever scaled any application beyond their garages... "I think the consistent prod/dev env is

Yikes... it sounds like a lot of people answering this post haven't ever scaled any application beyond their garages... "I think the consistent prod/dev env is overhyped." ... legitimately lol'd on this.. Docker specifically allows you to simplify and control the process of matching a dev environment, to a staging env, to a production environment - while leveraging simple scripting the cicd build / deploy processes that is repeatable. Repeatable code, repeatable deployments, being the consistency that a developer is supposed to want of their code and application. Yes, if you have a VM with 48 dedicated cores and 192GB of ram you can just go back to building a monolith like its a retro 90's throwback party - but it would be far more efficient to aim for a zero downtime blue/green deployment, so you can roll out your code without having to shut any service down -- which you can achieve very easily, incorporating Docker and even minikube into your VM. So, if you don't want a consistent build/deploy process that is repeatable, don't use docker If you don't want to take advantage of lessons learned and best practices by developers and sysadmins who have been doing this for 30+ years, don't use docker. Spend a few hours to learn docker -- there is a zillion simple copy/pasta docs and medium articles on how to get up and going with Docker and minikube. 20 years ago, the similar question would have been "Why would I use a VM instead of a physical machine?" with these same sort of answers like: "I already have a huge sever", "load balancers are stupid", etc, etc Today, VM's are the default go-to for people.. Containers are the next step in properly abstracting the development->Deployment process. There are massive advantages to be able to create VM Images and handle delta differences between them to track changes overtime and deploy and scale at a level that you cannot achieve with even a few physical servers. If you have never scaled an application multi-region, or deployed an application for 100,000+ people - you might not be aware of the need to make this process of patching, code deployments a consistent rolling-update process. I highly suggest you learn this now, since if your business is successfully, and you hit a trend spike and your single VM / one-service crashes, you can loose a lot more than spending a few hours to learn Docker and build a container that could be uploaded to AWS ECR and scaled up to 11 anytime you need... Docker -- or any type of container -- is the current best-in-class tech that we have for repeatable software development->Deployment. Don't shun it because of the popularity of it. Read about why it is advantageous to use it instead of finding an answer to validate why you shouldn't.