My containerless worflow, when compared to typical container workflows, usually involves splitting some of the responsibilities to the OS virtualization layer and some to the process layer.

For example, if I have a testing server and a prod server, to test a change I just git push to the testing branch. Which is quite fast and reproducible.

Yes in theory there can be side effects and leftover effects from the previous version, but I am also a competent programmer and have the capacity to ssh into the server to debug, so it's not a huge issue. So bottomline I don't virtualize as often.

To take a wildly different use case of containers, if I want to have two different systems on the same machine, I just run the two different systems as processes? You know there's a process for a sql db and an http server in the server and we are fine. You can even use users for more stringent encapsulation and security guarantees, it's fine.

But since we are talking about registries, I focused on the third distinct use case deployment automation.

The whole details on how to live without docker (and docker registries by extension) won't fit a hacker news comment, but be assured it's 100% possible and you'll be fine.

I'm focusing on docker as a whole because if I can prove that you don't need Docker, by extension I prove you don't need a docker registry. It's an overkill of an argument to show how ridiculous complaining about your free docker registries is. You are out here complaining about a problem with your Docker registries, while I'm a chad who can just axe Docker like it's nothing.