Docker is about containerization/sandboxing, you don't need to duplicate the OS. You can run your app as the init process for the sandbox with nothing else running in the background.

I think that on linux docker is not nearly as resource intensive as on Mac. Not sure of the actual (for example) memory pressures due to things like not sharing shared libs between processes, granted

Containers are not Virtual Machines. 1GB cannot run a lot of server software.

If stuff is written in .NET, Java or JavaScript. Hosting a non-trivial web app can use several hundred megabytes of memory.

> You can just as well not run docker.

this is naive

"just as well"? lmao sure i guess i could just manually set up the environment and have differences from what im hoping to use in productio

> 1GiB machine can run a lot of server software,

this is naive

it really depends if you're crapping out some basic web app versus doing something that's actually complicated and has a need for higher performance than synchronous web calls :)

in addition, my mq pays attention to memory pressure and tunes its flow control based on that. so i have a test harness that tests both conditions to ensure that some of my backoff logic works

> if RAM is not wasted on having duplicate OSes on one machine.

this is naive

that's not how docker works...

It's not OS duplication per se, but a SystemD one.