I'm just a hobbyist sysadmin, but I did get a ton of exposure over the decades deploying some pretty random stuff, often taking the long and painful way as a learning experience (rarely using containers, often compiling from source, …). I vividly remember deploying ejabberd for the first time in disbelief: for all it was doing, it was just a fire and forget/good defaults/good logging/self-healing experience. Highly recommend.