[annnnd]

While I agree with the spirit of your post, I think you are taking the argument too far in places. For instance, we are a small team of devs and Docker solved a real problem for us. Our deployment was once on bare OS and it was a nightmare. Different distributions, different library versions (with their own sets of bugs)... Unfortunately we couldn't demand a specific environment from our customers and at the same time it drained our resources trying to accommodate all installation variants. When Docker came out we tried it out, saw that it solves all these issues beautifully and never looked back. But we use it only because it insulates our installation from Linux (apart from the kernel that is), not because it is hip.

More general advice is: take G, A, FB, NF... papers (and HN posts, while we are at it ;) ) with a grain of salt, test before use and make sure it solves more problems than it creates - for you.

[cookiecaper]

Yeah, I don't mean it to be an all-encompassing prohibition. It's just important that people start with the basics and complicate their software with esoteric solutions only as a matter of necessity. This also ensures that the engineers understand the functionality that the esoteric solution needs to provide instead of making grossly incorrect assumptions and misuses that lead to major disasters (e.g., treating AMQP servers as a data store; a client lost data last week due to this silly assumption).