It sort of depends, if you’ve worked in a couple of corporates where you have to know a handful of various tools at each it quickly adds up to having enough knowledge to quickly deploy even what hacker news considers ‘heavyweight tooling’. Most of these tools have QuickStart guides that do get you most of the way there for a basic use case. I’m running a similar solo project with an almost-but-not-quite similar spreads of technologies.

But as I said, it depends on your history and what you work quickly with.

In the article the author says they chose Ansible because docker felt too heavyweight and unnecessary. It’s true that docker has a lot of stuff you don’t need in there, but trust me when I say Ansible is no picnic. In fact I find it easier to take what I need with Docker and Kubernetes and get running way quicker than I would ‘naked’ Ubuntu machines that I need to semi-manual previsioning with shell scripts or Ruby scripts. I got up and running with Kubernetes on DigitalOcean in less than a day, and Dockerfiles using familiar technologies I’ve used before take less than an hour to iron out.

You’ll get people who say that Docker is overkill and unnecessary and far too complicated for a solo project, but then you’ll get others who believe it’s a small file with 20 lines of declarations, sat alongside a 30 line yaml file that can provision all of your infrastructure instantly across any cloud provider you choose.