I mean, sure, any statically compiled application can be deployed at scale without any dependencies at all. If you don't consider the application's 1GB worth of

I mean, sure, any statically compiled application can be deployed at scale without any dependencies at all. If you don't consider the application's 1GB worth of compiled-in SDKs and libraries to be bundled dependencies. :) Back in the day we used to continuously deploy to thousands of servers without VMs or containers. Probably the largest-traffic sports site of the 2000s. But the application was mostly mod_perl, so dependencies still had to be managed, and it was intermittently a tire fire. There was no abstraction to run the applications immutably or idempotently. We actually acquired a company that had built a whole immutable build/deploy system around RPMs, so things became more predictable, but still host OS limitations would cause random bugs and the management interface was buggy. Re-bootstrapping hosts to shift load in the middle of peak traffic is a huge pain. Containers would have been great. We could've finally ditched Cfengine2 and most of the weird custom host-level configuration magic and just ship applications without fear that something that worked in dev would break in prod due to a configuration or build issue. We also could have changed load patterns nearly instantly, which you can't do with VMs as you have to spin up new VMs to have a new host OS (not that we had VMs, what a luxury!)