I once built a whole deployment system out of packaging all our services as Debian packages and running them out of our own apt repo. Once we got it working, this was a really low maintenance system and bringing new servers online was stupid easy.

Since then Debian packages have become easier to create and maintain. And it’s a great skill if you ever need to create e.g. a custom-compiled version of nginx or some such. It’s a really well thought out system and I am surprised it isn’t more widely used. By contrast Docker seems to be more portable but way more of a pain in the ass.