I actually recently wrote a piece of software that can handle millions of documents, where I packaged it up in a Docker container and ran it first in my homelab

I actually recently wrote a piece of software that can handle millions of documents, where I packaged it up in a Docker container and ran it first in my homelab, then moved over to the cloud, after which I scaled it to multiple parallel instances, here's the relevant blog post in the series: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/3-4-pidgeot-a-system-for-millions-of-documents-deploying-and-scaling https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/3-4-pidgeot-a-system-for-m... Nowadays almost all of the software that I write is in OCI compatible containers (typically Docker), because it lets you not care as much about what is inside of your container: if you follow the 12 Factor App principles, deploying a Java, .NET, Python, Ruby, Node etc. apps all looks the same from outside. Same for healthchecks, same for scaling, same for restarts, same for exposing ports, same for limiting CPU/RAM resources. You could do a lot of it with either systemd or bunches of other configuration on a typical *nix distro (hopefully automated through Ansible or something like that), but it's just more convenient, if you buy into that workflow. That said, for some tech stacks, Docker is hot garbage, for example, I've never worked with anything as annoying as PHP can be, line endings, file permissions and god knows what else messing everything up, especially if you're unlucky enough to have your dev box be on NTFS (e.g. Windows), about which I wrote a little rant called "Containers are broken": https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/containers-are-broken https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/containers-... Of course, I will still keep using containers, because that almost wholly decouples what OS my servers are running from what the applications need to run (I just need Docker or a similar runtime available for that OS) and I can have as many parallel instances of whatever I need (e.g. 5 MySQL instances, 4 PostgreSQL instances, 3 Node instances, 2 Redis instances etc.) all on the same node, each with their own configuration and limits. Both on the server and locally. The same goes for the apps that I might build and want to upgrade. Seriously, you've no idea how liberating it is to be able to take bad or possibly insecure software and put it in its own little box where it can't mess too much up (especially relevant for something like Python, where the story around packaging software and environments can be a dumpsterfire, but also even simpler cases like Node/Ruby/JVM versions and PATH variables, as well as system packages) and do so easier than cgroups directly or systemd slices would let me. I'd still like to ditch Windows for *nix on my dev box as well, but sadly some great software (MobaXTerm for example) and most games still don't work. Of course, one could just dual boot and thus also decrease the risks of games and such not being trustworthy, but for my personal stuff I'm kind of lazy and the *nix distro that sits on the other disk partition gets underused somewhat.