Typically deployment is a "solve-once" problem, even if you don't use docker. You set up chef, puppet, ansible or fabric to handle deployment, installs, databas

Typically deployment is a "solve-once" problem, even if you don't use docker. You set up chef, puppet, ansible or fabric to handle deployment, installs, database migrations and so on, and tweak as needed. Of course that may not be the case if you have some kind of commodity service you have to install in lots of different environments, such as Wordpress.