This is kinda where I’m at as well. I have always run my home services each in their own VM. There’s no fuss to set up a new one, if I want to move it to a different server I just copy the *.img file over and launch it. Sure I run a lot of internet services across my various machines but it all just works so I don’t understand what purpose there would be to converting all the custom configurations over to docker. It might make sense if I was trying to run all my services directly on the bare metal, but who does that?
Comment on Should I move to Docker?
ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I’m gonna play devil’s advocate here.
You should play around with it. But I’ve been a Linux server admin for a long time and — this might be unpopular — I think Docker is unimportant for your situation. I use Docker daily at work and I love it. But I didn’t bother with it for my home server. I’ll never need to scale it or deploy anything repeatedly or where I need 100% uptime.
At home, I tend to try out new things and my old docker-compose files are just not that valuable. Docker is amazing at work where I have different use cases but it mostly just adds needless complexity on a home server.
Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 6 months ago
theterrasque@infosec.pub 6 months ago
VM’s have much bigger overhead, for one. And VM’s are less reproducible too. If you had to set up a VM again, do you have all the steps written down? Every single step? Including that small “oh right” thing you always forget? A Dockerfile is basically just a list of those steps, written in a way a computer can follow. And every time you build an image in docker, it just plays that list and gives you the resulting file system ready to run.
It’s incredibly practical in some cases, let’s say you want to try a different library or upgrade a component to a newer version. With VM’s you could do it live, but you risk not being able to go back. You could make a copy or make a checkpoint, but that’s rather resource intensive. With docker you just change the Dockerfile slightly and build a new image.
The resulting image is also immutable, which means that if you restart the docker container, it’s like reverting to first VM checkpoint after finished install, throwing out any cruft that have gathered. You can exempt specific file and folders from this, if needed. So every cruft and change that have happened gets thrown out except the data folder(s) for the program.
Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 6 months ago
I’m not sure I understand this idea that VMs have a high overhead. I just checked one of my servers, there are nine VMs running everything from chat channels to email to web servers, and the server is 99.1% idle. And this is on a poweredge R620 with low-power CPUs, it’s not like I’m running something crazy-fast or even all that new. Hell until the beginning of this year I was running all this stuff on poweredge 860’s which are nearly 20 years old now.
If I needed to set up the VM again, well I would just copy the backup as a starting point, or copy one of the mirror servers. Copying a VM doesn’t take much, I mean even my bigger storage systems only use an 8GB image. That takes, what, 30 seconds? And for building a new service image, I have a nearly stock install which has the basics like LDAP accounts and network shares set up. Otherwise once I get a service configured I just let Debian manage the security updates and do a full upgrade as needed. I’ve never had a reason to try replacing an individual library for anything, and each of my VMs run a single service (http, smtp, dns, etc) so even if I did try that there wouldn’t be any chance of it interfering with anything else.
Honestly from what you’re saying here, it just sounds like docker is made for people who previously ran everything directly under the main server installation and frequently had upgrades of one service breaking another service. I suppose docker works for those people, but the problems you are saying it solves are problems I have never run in to over the last two decades.
theterrasque@infosec.pub 6 months ago
Nine. How much ram do they use? How much disk space? Try running 90, or 900. Currently, on my personal hobby kubernetes cluster, there’s 83 different instances running. Because of the low overhead, I can run even small tools in their own container, completely separate from the rest. If I run say… a postgresql server… spinning one up takes 90mb disk space for the image, and about 15 mb ram.
I worked at a company that did - among other things - hosting, and was using VM’s for easier management and separation between customers. I wasn’t directly involved in that part day to day, but was friend with the main guy there. It was tough to manage. He was experimenting with automatic creating and setting up new VM’s, stripping them for unused services and files, and having different sub-scripts for different services. This was way before docker, but already then admins were looking in that direction.
So aschually, docker is kinda made for people who runs things in VM’s, because that is exactly what they were looking for and duct taping things together for before docker came along.
GreatBlueHeron@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
That’s exactly how I feel about it. Except (as noted in my post…) the software availability issue. More and more stuff I want is “docker first” and I really have to go out of my way to install and maintain non docker versions.
greybeard@lemmy.one 6 months ago
The advantage of docker, as I see it for home labs, is keeping things tidy, ensuring compatibility, and easy to manage/backup setup configs, app configs, and app data. It is all very predictable and manageable. I can move my docker compose and data from one host to another in literal seconds. I can, likewise, spin up and down test environments in seconds too. Obviously the whole scaling thing that people love containers for is pointless in a homelab, but many of the things that make it scalable also make it easy to manage.
Tsubodai@programming.dev 6 months ago
Im probably the opposite of you! Started using docker at home after messing up my raspberry pi a few too many times trying stuff out, and not really knowing what the hell I was doing. Since moved to a proper nas, with (for me, at least) plenty of RAM.
Love the ability to try out a new service, which is kind of self-documenting (especially if I write comments in the docker-compose file). And just get rid of it without leaving any trace if it’s not for me.
Added portainer to be able to check on things from my phone browser, grafana for some pretty metrics and graphs, etc etc etc.
And now at work, it’s becoming really, really useful, and I’m the only person in my (small, scientific research) team who uses containers regularly. While others are struggling to keep their fragile python environments working, I can try out new libraries, take my env to the on-prem HPC or the external cloud, and I don’t lose any time at all. Even “deployed” some little utility scripts for folks who don’t realise that they’re actually pulling my image from the internal registry when they run it. A much, much easier way of getting a little time-saving script into the hands of people who are forced to use Linux but don’t have a clue how to use it.