> My tool of choice is usually Ansible, so, from the Ansible point of view, deploying to a container, VPS, bare server, or a cluster, looks pretty much the same.

I agree that Ansible is an excellent tool! Though personally, I enjoy establishing a clear boundary between the "infrastructure" and "app" parts of any setup - the former ensuring that OS has whatever runtimes are necessary for any given application to run, user accounts, groups, folders, services etc., whereas the latter is whatever apps are running on the server.

So I'd use Ansible for most of the former, setup a container cluster and then use something like https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/communit... to manage actual application deployments. Why? To make the apps more throwaway and limit the fallout in case of bad configurations/deployments, as well as make sharing the base Ansible playbooks for what constitutes a production ready server setup easier amongst projects.

Of course, you could as well use Ansible to install something like JDK/Tomcat and set up its configuration which worked well for me in the past, but personally that didn't scale quite as well as running Java/Node/Ruby/Python/PHP in containers and approaching them with Ansible almost like black boxes (e.g. copy a bunch of files, like secrets, into these directories, deploy some arbitrary YAML against the Docker Swarm cluster), which was surprisingly easy to do.