The overhead of containerisation is mostly in the learning curve for teams that are not already familiar with it (and the consequent risk of a poor implementati

The overhead of containerisation is mostly in the learning curve for teams that are not already familiar with it (and the consequent risk of a poor implementation). A well designed build pipeline and deployment is at least as efficient to work with as your Terraform+Ansible. If you have such a team, it can of course make sense to delay or avoid containerisation if you don't see obvious major technical benefits. But those teams will get rarer as time goes on, and since we're talking about startups, honestly it would be questionable to build a new ops team from people with no containers knowledge in 2022.