[jeffhuys]

For a while we used it for scalable preview environments: specify the branch, hit deploy, and have a QA-able environment, with full database (anonymized) ready to go in 15 minutes (DB was time bottleneck).

We ditched it for EC2s which were faster and more reliable while being cheaper, but that's beside the point.

Locally I use OrbStack by the way, much less intrusive than Docker Desktop.

[spicyusername]

EC2 and containers are orthogonal technologies, though.

Containers are the packaging format, EC2 is the infrastructure. (docker, crio, podman, kata, etc are the runtime)

When deploying on EC2, you still need to deploy your software, and when using containers you still need somewhere to deploy to.

[jeffhuys]

True; I conflate the two often. The EC2s run on an IAM image, same as production does, which before was a docker image.