Or there was “git push heroku main” or whatever it was back in the day. Had quite a moment when I first did that from a train – we take such things for granted now of course...
Costs a crap ton for what it is, but it is nice.
Honestly, even setting up autoscaling via AMIs isn’t that hard. Docker is in many ways the DevOps equivalent of the JS front end world: excessive complexity, largely motivated by people who have no idea what the alternatives are.
My point is that a lot of devs reach to Docker because they think they need it to do these "hard" things, and they immediately get lost in the complexity of that ecosystem, having never realized that there might be a better way.