Exactly my reasons: I don‘t use Docker because it‘s great that i can (could?) scale the universe.
In my case, I simply use Docker because it is so easy to set up n HTTP services listening on port 80/442 on the same server and then put a reverse proxy (traefik) with Let‘s Encrypt in front of it. I don‘t need to worry about port conflicts. I don‘t need to worry about running Nginx and Apache on the same host. I don‘t need to worry about multiple versions of Go/PHP/Dotnet/[insert lang here].
Still, I can‘t scale (single machine) but I don‘t need to. I don‘t have a failover, because I don‘t need one. But I have so much simpler management of the dozen services I run on the host. And that‘s worth it IMHO.
I think it‘s always about the right tool for the job. And I think if the OP does work with an automated script and scp, there‘s nothing wrong with that. Because that also adds reproducability to the pipeline and that‘s just such an important point. As long as nobody ssh‘s into prod and modifies some file by hand.
100%. For the startup we're starting/working on now, we're running microk8s on bare metal (dedicated servers).
What you describe is a big reason for it. Once you have k8s set up, services can be very easily deployed with auto TLS, and basic auth or oauth2 is really simple as well.
So we're big believers in vertical scaling, but still use k8s (microk8s or k3s) for these kinds of benefits. An additional benefit of this is that it makes scaling/transitioning to a bigger/managed k8s easy down the road.
It might sound like overkill, but it takes about 10 minutes to set up microk8s on a ubuntu lts server. It comes with nginx ingress. Install cert manager (another 5 mins) and you don't even need traefik these days. All configs are kept in Git.
After you've spent weeks / months reading blogs, installing dependencies, tweaking parameters, playing around deployments and figuring out new names for the same old stuff, debugging that extra whitespace in the yaml file only to figure out oww, you could use helm charts for deployments which is eerily similar to how jsp looked like 15 years ago and everything that was wrong with templating deployments than scripting it.
Then it takes about 4 mins.
And now you get to do brown bag sessions with your baffled team members! Yay!
But only till kubernetes evicts your pods for being too resource "hungry". Gotta keep prod up folks. Better grab a coffee and kubectl ("kube-cuttle" is it?) into prod to check why the pods have restarted 127 times.
All these “it takes 10 minutes” should really be “it takes 10 minutes plus several hours/days/weeks actually learning how to run and maintain all this stuff”.
In my case, I simply use Docker because it is so easy to set up n HTTP services listening on port 80/442 on the same server and then put a reverse proxy (traefik) with Let‘s Encrypt in front of it. I don‘t need to worry about port conflicts. I don‘t need to worry about running Nginx and Apache on the same host. I don‘t need to worry about multiple versions of Go/PHP/Dotnet/[insert lang here].
Still, I can‘t scale (single machine) but I don‘t need to. I don‘t have a failover, because I don‘t need one. But I have so much simpler management of the dozen services I run on the host. And that‘s worth it IMHO.
I think it‘s always about the right tool for the job. And I think if the OP does work with an automated script and scp, there‘s nothing wrong with that. Because that also adds reproducability to the pipeline and that‘s just such an important point. As long as nobody ssh‘s into prod and modifies some file by hand.