I’m not fully sure I understand your question, particularly the part about scale. By scale do you mean a large organization (I.e. thousands of developers with h

I’m not fully sure I understand your question, particularly the part about scale. By scale do you mean a large organization (I.e. thousands of developers with highly heterogeneous tech stacks), or by scale do you mean a high volume of traffic? If you mean high volume, I’ve seen people do it with serverless stacks like Google app engine or AWS lambda and some managed databases. If you mean large organization, then I haven’t heard of anyone doing it without containers or VMs. It’s not that alternatives don’t exist, it’s that it’s nearly impossibly to get everything onto an alternative and containers are extremely flexible. For example, large companies often buy other companies and it’s prohibitively expensive to rebuild it all relative to the cost of putting it in a container and leveraging the build/deploy pipelines that they have already. Same thing with ancient legacy tech, far easier to containerize it than rebuild it.