Hm, I don’t know about that either. While scale is their primary purpose, another core tenant of containerization is reproducibility. For example
- If you are developing any sort of software, containers are a great way to ensure that the environment of your builds remains consistent.
- If you are frequently rebuilding a server/application for any reason, containers provide a good way to ensure everything is configured exactly as it was before, and when used with Git, changes are easy to track. There are also other tools that excel at this (like Ansible).
zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 weeks ago
That to me still feels like a variety of “scale”. All of these tools (Ansible is a great example) are of dubious benefit when your scale of systems is small. If you only have a single dev machine or server, having an infrastructure-as-code system or containerized abstraction layer, just feels to me like unnecessary added mental overhead. If this post had been in a community about FOSS development or general programming, I’d feel differently as all of these things can be of great use there. Maybe my idea of selfhosting just isn’t as grandiose as some of the people in here. If you have a room full of server racks in your house, that’s a whole other ballgame.