> Deployments not using Docker will no longer be supported.

This is the way (while also allowing people to use their own proxies etc., but being clear about those not being officially supported).

Ship your back end container, your front end container, tell people how to set up the off the shelf DB containers or whatever else your software needs and if you don’t need 20 different components like Sentry self-hosted versions do, you’ll be fine. The DB can be a container or not. The reverse proxy can be a container or not. Hell, if someone wants to build the back end or front end from source and serve them differently they can, just on their own time. That’s pretty close to the 12 Factor App principles.

Just avoid a lot of complexity when possible: do traditional SSR, or with some progressive enhancements or what I like to do in this day and age (unless maximum accessibility is paramount) only use your back end for the API and have a traditional SPA, none of that complex Next.js stuff. Your front end just becomes a bundle of files that you can put in a web server container to be proxied by whatever the ingress is. At most the Docker entry point would change some values in config.json that the app loads on startup in the browser.

If someone asks for Kubernetes support or whatever, just wish them the best of luck in setting it up themselves!