What you absolutely should have: A reproducible way to get your tech stack bootstrapped and deployed. This can be a VM and ansible, or nix, or Docker, or a set

What you absolutely should have: A reproducible way to get your tech stack bootstrapped and deployed. This can be a VM and ansible, or nix, or Docker, or a set of shell scripts. Docker is just one way of doing things, and recently it's the most common way. I used to be more cautious but so far I've not run into any bigger problems, so I'm using it for some things in my private infra. But I don't think it's actually better per se. Where it shines for me is spinning up a local database, or some service I need. Ephemeral stuff that I can throw away again, less so for long-running production deployments. (Unless you need/want k8s anyway)