[jayfehr]

You don't have to, but it would probably be best to keep it consistent. You could run your live server on barebones OS as you normally would, then create a docker image to mirror that. However, as we all know, mirrors often get out of sync fairly quick. But if you use the same image and only update using a Fabric or Ansible script, then you can be pretty certain that all your environments are identical. Not to mention that any newly created environments will brought up to the same point in no time at all.