So I amend to you don’t need it to be stateful, you could have an image like you talked about that is loaded every time (that’s essentially what kubernetes does), but you will still need space somewhere as scratch drive. A place docker will places images and temporary file systems while it’s running.

Putting the image somewhere is easy. I’ve got TBs of space available on my NAS drives, especially right now with not acquiring any additional linux ISOs.

For state, check out docker’s volume backings here: docs.docker.com/engine/storage/volumes/. You could use nfs to another server as an example for your volumes. Your volumes would never need to be on your “app server”, but instead could be loaded via nfs from your storage server.

I’ll check that out. If that allows me to actually write databases to disk on the nfs backing volume, that would be amazing. That’s the biggest issue I run into (regularly).

This is all nearing into kubernetes territory though. If you’re thinking about netboot and automatically starting containers, and handling stateless volumes and storing volumes in a way that are synced with a storage server… it might be time for kubernetes.

I don’t think I’ve ever looked into kubernetes. I’ll have to look into that at some point… Any good beginner resources?