Similar to docker, but the technical differences matter a lot. VMs have a lot of capabilities containers don’t have, while missing some of the value on being lightweight.

However, a more direct (if longer) answer would be: all cloud providers ultimately offer you VMs. You can run docker on those VMs, but you have to start with a VM. Selfhosted stuff (my homelab, for example) will also generally end up as a mix of VMs and docker containers. So no matter what project you’re working on at scale, you’ve probably got some VMs around.

Whether you then use containers inside them is a more nuanced and subtle question.