I don't know that I'd say "web scale", in part because I still don't think I know exactly what that means, but I used to work at a place that handled a lot of data, in a distributed manner, in an environment where reliability was critical, without containers.
The gist of their approach was radical uniformity. For the most part, all VMs ran identical images. Developers didn't get to pick dependencies willy-nilly; we had to coordinate closely with ops. (Tangentially, at subsequent employers I've been amazed to see how just a few hours of developers handling things for themselves can save many minutes of talking to ops.) All services and applications were developed and packaged to be xcopy deployable, and they all had to obey some company standards on how their CLI worked, what signals they would respond to and how, stuff like that. That standard interface allowed it all to be orchestrated with a surprisingly small volume - in terms of SLOC, not capability - of homegrown devops infrastructure.
The gist of their approach was radical uniformity. For the most part, all VMs ran identical images. Developers didn't get to pick dependencies willy-nilly; we had to coordinate closely with ops. (Tangentially, at subsequent employers I've been amazed to see how just a few hours of developers handling things for themselves can save many minutes of talking to ops.) All services and applications were developed and packaged to be xcopy deployable, and they all had to obey some company standards on how their CLI worked, what signals they would respond to and how, stuff like that. That standard interface allowed it all to be orchestrated with a surprisingly small volume - in terms of SLOC, not capability - of homegrown devops infrastructure.