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I'm actually doing the opposite :)
I've been using vms, lxc containers and docker for years. In the last 3 years or so, I've slowly moved to just docker containers. I still have a few vms, of course, but they only run docker :)
Containers are a breeze to update, there is no dependency hell, no separate vms for each app...
More recently, I've been trying out kubernetes. Mostly to learn and experiment, since I use it at work.
It's hard for me to tell if I'm just set in my ways according to the way I used to do it, but I feel exactly the same.
I think Docker started as "we're doing things at massive scale, and we need to have a way to spin up new installations automatically and reliably." That was good.
It's now become "if I automate the installation of my software, it doesn't matter that the whole thing is a teetering mess of dependencies and scripted hacks, because it'll all be hidden inside the container, and also people with no real understanding can just push the button and deploy it."
I forced myself to learn how to use Docker for installing a few things, found it incredibly hard to do anything of consequence to the software inside the container, and for my use case it added extra complexity for no reason, and I mostly abandoned it.
I hate how docker made it so that a lot of projects only have docker as the official way to install the software.
This is my tinfoil opinion, but to me, docker seems to enable the "phone-ification" ( for a lack of better term) of softwares. The upside is that it is more accessible to spin services on a home server. The downside is that we are losing the knowledge of how the different parts of the software work together.
I really like the Turnkey Linux projects. It's like the best of both worlds. You deploy a container and a script setups the container for you, but after that, you have the full control over the software like when you install the binaries
I hate how docker made it so that a lot of projects only have docker as the official way to install the software.
Just so we are clear on this. This is not dockers fault. The projects chose Docker as a distribution method, most likely because it's as widespread and known as it is. It's simply just to reach more users without spreading too thin.
You are right and I should have been more precise.
I understand why docker was created and became popular because it abstracts a lot of the setup and make deployment a lot easier.
I agree with it, docker can be simple but can be a real pain too. The good old scripts are the way to go in my opinion, but I kinda like the lxc containers in docker, this principle of containerization is surely great but maybe not the way docker does... (maybe distrobox could be good too π€· )
Docker is absolutely a good when having to scale your env but I think that you should build your own images and not use prebuild ones
Honestly after using docker and containerization for more than a decade, my home setups are just yunohost or baremetal (a small pi) with some periodic backups. I care more about my own time now than my home setup and I want things to just be stable. Its been good for a couple of years now, without anything other than some quick updates. You dont have to deal with infa changes with updates, you dont have to deal with slowdowns, everything works pretty well.
At work its different Docker, Kubernetes, etc... are awesome because they can deal gracefully with dependencies, multiple deploys per day, large infa. But ill be the first to admit that takes a bit more manpower and monitoring systems that are much better than a small home setup.
I tend to also agree with your opinion,but lately Yunohost have quite few broken apps, they're not very fast on updates and also not many active developers. Hats off to them though because they're doing the best they can !
I have to agree, the community seems to come and go. Some apps have daily updates and some have been updated only once. If I were to start a new server, I would probably still pick yunohost, but remove some of the older apps as one offs. The lemmy one for example is stuck on a VERY old version. However the GotoSocial app is updated every time there is an update in the main repo.
Still super good support for something that is free and open source. Stable too :) but sometimes stability means old.
Didn't really tried YunoHost it's basically a simple selfhostable cloud server?
yeah I think that at the end even if it seems a bit "retro" the "normal install" with periodic backups/updates on default vm (or even lxc containers) are the best to use, the most stable and configurable
Are you using docker-compose and local bind mounts? I'd not, you're making backing up uch harder than it needs to be. Its certainly easier than backing up LXCs and a whole lot easier to restore.
Are you using docker compose scripts? Backup should be easy, you have your compose scripts to configure the containers, then the scripts can easily be commited somewhere or backed up.
Data should be volume mounted into the container, and then the host disk can be backed up.
The only app that I've had to fight docker on is Seafile, and even that works quite well now.
Docker is a convoluted mess of overlays and truly weird network settings. I found that I have no interest in application containers and would much prefer to set up multiple services in a system container (or VM) as if it was a bare-metal server. I deploy a small Proxmox cluster with Proxmox Backup Server in a CT on each node and often use scripts from https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/. Everything is automatically backed up (and remote sync'd twice) with a deduplication factor of 10. A Dockerless Homelab FTW!
I use podman using home-manager configs, I could run the services natively but currently I have a user for each service that runs the podman containers. This way each service is securely isolated from each other and the rest of the system. Maybe if/when NixOS supports good selinux rules I'll switch back to running it native.
I can recommend NixOS. It's quite simple if your wanted application is part of NixOS already. Otherwise it requires quite some knowledge to get it to work anyways.
Yeah, It's either 4 lines and you got some service running... Or you need to learn a functional language, fight the software project and make it behave on an immutable filesystem and google 2 pages of boilerplate code to package it... I rarely had anything in-between. π
Hey now, you can also spend 20 pages of documentation and 10 pages of blogs/forums/github^1^ and you can implement a whole nix module such that you only need to write a further 3 lines to activate the service.
1 Your brain can have a little source code, as a threat.
And I've done the exact opposite moves everything off of lxc to docker containers. So much easier and nicer less machines to maintain.
Less "machines" but you need to maintain docker containers at the end
For me the power of docker is its inherent immutability. I want to be able to move a service around without having to manual tinker, install packages and change permissions etc. Itβs repeatable and reliable. However, to get to the point of understanding enough about it to do this reliably can be a huge investment of time. As a daily user of docker (and k8s) I would use it everyday over a VM. Iβve lost count of the number of VMs Iβve setup following installation guidelines, and missed a single step - so machines that should be identical arenβt. I do however understand the frustration with it when you first start, but IMO stick with it as the benefits are huge.
Yeah docker is great for this and it's really a pleasure to deploy apps so quickly but the problems comes later, if you want to really customize the service to you, you can't instead of doing your own image...
In most cases you can get away with over mounting configuration files within the container. In extreme cases you can build your own image - but the steps for that are just the changes you would have applied manually on a VM. At least that image is repeatable and you can bring it up somewhere else without having to manually apply all those changes in a panic.
I love docker, and backups are a breeze if you're using ZFS or BTRFS with volume sending. That is the bummer about docker, it relies on you to back it up instead of having its native backup system.
What are you hosting on docker? Are you configuring your apps after? Did you used the prebuild images or build yourself?
I use the *arr suite, a project zomboid server, a foundry vtt server, invoice ninja, immich, next cloud, qbittorrent, and caddy.
I pretty much only use prebuilt images, I run them like appliances. Anything custom I'd run in a vm with snapshots as my docker skills do not run that deep.
I should also say I use portainer for some graphical hand holding. And I run watchtower for updates (although portainer can monitor GitHub's and run updates based on monitored merged).
For simplicity I create all my volumes in the portainer gui, then specify the mount points in the docker compose (portainer calls this a stack for some reason).
The volumes are looped into the base OS (Truenas scale) zfs snapshots. Any restoration is dead simple. It keeps 1x yearly, 3x monthly, 4x weekly, and 1x daily snapshot.
All media etc.. is mounted via NFS shares (for applications like immich or plex).
Restoration to a new machine should be as simple as pasting the compose, restoring and restoring the Portainer volumes.
Yeah, when I got started I initially put everything in Docker because that's what I was recommended to do, but after a couple years I moved everything out again because of the increased complexity, especially in terms of the networking, and that you now have to deal with the way Docker does things, and I'm not getting anything out of it that would make up for that.
When I moved it out back then I was running Gentoo on my servers, by now it's NixOS because of the declarative service configuration, which shines especially in a server environment. If you want easy service setup, like people usually say they like about Docker, I think it's definitely worth a try. It can be as simple as "services.foo.enable = true".
(To be fair NixOS has complexity too, but most of it is in learning how the configuration language which builds your operating system works, and not in the actual system itself, which is mostly standard except for the store. A NixOS service module generates a normal systemd service + potentially other files in the file system.)
nixos definitely gives a try
I ditched nix and install software only through portage. If needed, i make my own ebuilds.
This has two advantages:
Docker is good when combined with gVisor runtime for better isolation.
What is gVisor?
gVisor is an application kernel, written in memory safe Golang, that emulates most system calls and massively reduces the attack surface of the kernel. This is important since the host and guest share the same kernel, and Docker runs rootful. Root inside a Docker container is the same as root on the host, as long as a sandbox escape is used. This could arise if a container image requires unsafe permissions like Docker socket access. gVisor protects against privilege escalation by only using root at the start and never handing root over to the guest.
Sydbox OCI runtime is also cool and faster than gVisor (both are quick)
I like reminding people that with every new technology, the old one is still around. The new gets most of the attention, but the old is still kicking. (We still have wire wrapped programs kicking around.)
You are all good. Spend your limited attention on other things.