[AnHonestComment]

I use Docker without the network virtualization as a package manager.

Docker make it easy to run the same version of code in different places and let’s things run next to each other without version conflicts.

Also, I think you’re in a very small minority not to care about $720/yr increases in your hobbies.

[arcturus17]

GP was talking about projects that had revenue, and about "hiring someone" past a single instance.

I replied that beyond a single instance, you can probably get away with not hiring a K8s devops person and just spinning another instance. I'm not sure you've read this whole thing right.

And yes, I certainly wouldn't mind paying an additional $720 / yr for a project that had revenue; I almost certainly wouldn't want to spend money hiring a specialist, or spend time hyperoptimizing that myself - I make that in about a dozen hours of work, so counting how far one can go down the rabbit hole of optimizing server costs, and the associated cost of opportunity, the economics are crystal clear.

I don't have any successful personal projects but I have significant experience working with clients, and they are sold on the reasoning pretty much every single time ("I can charge you $3,000 for developing this feature, or we can use a paid service for $720 a year").

I also don't see how Docker is going to save you that much money; if you need a certain amount of compute, you need a certain amount of compute. AWS ElasticBeanstalk for instance charges nothing for spinning up an additional instance compared to EC2; there is no overhead for the PaaS aspect of it, like there would be in Heroku. Digital Ocean app platform is the same as EB, AFAIK.

[AnHonestComment]

GP talked about using Docker to do complex single host deployments until they needed horizontal scaling, which given max VM power, is after they can afford someone to manage it for them.

That makes me think they have multiple services of variable workload packed onto a single host, eg web server, async, and DB all on a single host via Docker.

That’s the antithesis of EB, which can only do horizontal scaling. Docker provides a way to replicate those multiple services in a deployment configuration when you want to set up a host image.

Not using Docker as an easy way to pack it all onto a single box as long as they can is just wasted expense.