I do my level best to stay away from containers. I don't think most people even need them. It's a fad of sorts. I tend to stick with the tried and true and not follow trends, cloud or otherwise. Nothing worse than having your data on someone else's HW and losing connectivity through no fault of your own. Years ago, I worked for UUNET in Reston/Ashburn, VA, and built web servers and the attendant HW/SW that ran them (usually Sun Solaris/Apache/Oracle). We always had a "back net" into every device. Now? One NIC, one way in. I always like having more than one way to get to a device, be it local or remote. With the cloud, you tend to give this up. I recommend VMs over the cloud using someone else's data and data centre. Nothing worse than going to a tech conference with your boss, and him being the "deer in the headlights" as it were with regard to buying into what's being sold by the vendors. Last time we went, it took me the entire 3-hour car ride home to convince him we didn't need half of what was on offer. I tend to be old school and prefer to make do with Linux/FreeBSD VMs, and whatever software is needed to make something work. I like being in control of my own architecture.