Discussing tech choices early on is always going to happen. You can try and be a purist and tell everyone to just talk requirements, but people are people, and

Discussing tech choices early on is always going to happen. You can try and be a purist and tell everyone to just talk requirements, but people are people, and requirements and tech are intertwined. An unreasonable requirement may suddenly make complexity balloon, but if early on it's spoken out loud that requirement XYZ is very difficult with technology ABC, it may emerge that the requirement was only a nice to have and can be lived without. So it goes both ways. There are still mitigations around this, just my opinion. So running in containers means you have a reasonable level of confidence that it can run in many places. How you run it in containers may make a difference. Standalone on its own represents a very small investment of overhead, but it's on a VM, still not terrible. k8s is a popular way to do it but is massive, and is not that different from a lock-in. Fargate and Container Apps take away a lot of that overhead and the lock-in is minimal, because you can escape to other kinds of hosting quite easily. I'd pick Fargate over the other choices where possible.