Why doesn’t anyone weep for Docker?

Pick one cloud provider first and write some setup scripts, i.e. scripts to build an initial (minimal) environment, 'from scratch', for your app and its components, e.g. create a new EC2 instance for the web app, upload your build package to it, etc.. Write the scripts so that any 'secrets', e.g. your AWS API key, are provided as either environment variables or regular command line arguments.

Then, still for the first cloud provider, write some update scripts, i.e. scripts to update your web app and its components.

Assuming your app, or its deployed 'instances', are relatively small and intended to serve a modest load, I'd suggest starting out treating the cloud servers or services as 'pets', i.e. entities you distinguish by name and for which you would be 'sad' if they 'died' (crashed or shutdown). At larger scales, it's often worth treating servers as 'cattle', i.e. a mass of nameless entities, but you probably won't need that at this point or anytime soon. (You'll know better tho.)

As for "containerization and other fancy, related tools that I've been reading on HN in the past couple of years", they're just like any other software – tools that can be used but aren't ever strictly necessary.

Containers are, basically, virtualized OSes, and they can be (very) useful. In my opinion, they're most useful as a way to bundle components of an app with an OS (and other OS components). That you can run those containers in different environments and be reasonably assured they're (mostly) identical can be a big benefit. But there are associated costs too (as with anything)! But if your app and all of its components can comfortably fit on a single (virtual) server, the cost of any changes you need to make to your app to run inside them are probably not worth the (currently) modest benefits.

And all of the other "fancy ... tools" are generally even more a matter of tradeoffs you'll need to make. Once your app, or (production) instances of it, are distributed over several, or many, servers, and you start adding things like load balancers, caching, separate search services, etc., then the benefits of the other 'fancy' tools will start to make more sense.

But, like with many things, it's good experience to directly run into some of the issues that containers and the other fancy tools aim to solve, and really try to solve them yourself with DIY solutions, before committing to use yet another program or tool to do it for you.

Of course, if you just want to learn those tools, and you'd like to use your own app as a 'motivate example', that's perfectly reasonable and valid too. I would recommend tho not to lean on those tools for your own immediate needs unless you really need them.

Using docker images means that we can take the thing that developer A built and that "runs on their machine" (without necessarily having that developer on hand) and have developer B easily launch it on their machine without having any dependency or isolation or reproducibility issues, and after making some trivial changes put it in a new, fresh production server without having to ask the original dev how it was/should be configured.

> No config management is all-encompassing and so without extreme diligence you will lose the state of your servers over time.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "all-encompassing". Surely all of the popular config management systems have 'escape hatches' to let you do anything you could do from a shell, which seems pretty "all-encompassing" to me. But if you mean the config management system don't completely enforce a specific 'state' for managed servers then of course you're correct. Containers don't do that either, beyond periodically replacing running containers with new ones created from a base image (and even that's almost certainly not perfect either).

Unless your container hosts are entirely managed by someone else (and probably even not then, in the fullness of time), you're always going to "lose the state of your servers over time". There's (almost always?) some state somewhere that has to be explicitly managed and thus requires, generally, "extreme diligence".

I do agree that containerization and config management are very different but, like everything, it's 'just' another set of tradeoffs to be made, hopefully depending on one's actual or expected needs and wants.

Solaris, Minix, etc., were but a number of Unix's goin' on at that time. There were others.

I believe Linus was doing a kernel for his comp-sci adventures in a Finnish uni, well-known for such capers ..