I see Docker mentioned every other thread and was wondering how useful it is for non development things, and if so what they are.
Two things, one you care about and one you might not. The one you care about: you can set up a service in isolation. You can then test it, make sure it works, and switch over to it once you are sure, with almost no downtime. This is important for things you actually need to use. Once you do something like breaking your primary email server, you will understand. Also, less important, you can set up a service on, say, a VM at home, and move it to a VPS, without having to transfer the entire image, and it will work the same. The one you don’t care about. That last bit about moving servers around is important for cloud providers who turn these things on and off all the time.