Seriously, I work in ops with a side of coding and in order of "most pleasant" to "most annoying":

- Go and similar "one binary". Bonus points if static files are also embedded

- "Just a JAR with few parameters"

- Anything that comes pre-packaged in OS. Perl with OS-provided libs.

- Enterprise Java with code-as-xml for config. More pleasant if we're not the ones managing the XMLS

- C/C++ apps with reasonable deps that don't need re-compiling half of OS

- Bare containers. Shit visibility without a lot of tooling but at least we don't have fight deps

- k8s. Complexity of system rarely pays off with the relatively simple apps our devs are deploying and need even more tooling for good visibility

- Ruby outside of container - just fucking kill me. A bunch of requirements for libs in system just to compile "gems" (why those cunts can't call it libs like everyone else), long startup, leaks memory, took them 10+ years to make a web server that's not completely shit...

- Python - if I see something is in Python I try to find alternative solutions. I swear half of the install instructions either just don't work or shit all over home/system dirs. The absolute clusterfuck of py2-3 migration didn't help either, thankfully it appears its finally over. Bonus demerit if instructions mention setup.py. Tho to be fair I didn't tried recently, maybe it is better

I have been explaining to folks how OpenAPI is basically WSDL-lite. And is building up to be as big, at their current velocity. Kubernetes and friends, it is hard not to see as non JVM Glassfish servers. I remember WAR files being far easier to reason about than the current bundle setups we have today. SAR files were an amusing stab at the same thing, complete with the server managing deployment/startup order.

I still don't want to go back to that time, mind you. Is probably why I'm so hesitant on the current attempts.

Yep. For small projects, why is it so hard to have a "deploy to server" button next to "run locally" in my IDE?