this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2024
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Hello! πŸ˜€
I want to share my thoughts on docker and maybe discuss about it!
Since some months I started my homelab and as any good "homelabing guy" I absolutely loved using docker. Simple to deploy and everything. Sadly these days my mind is changing... I recently switch to lxc containers to make easier backup and the xperience is pretty great, the only downside is that not every software is available natively outside of docker πŸ™ƒ
But I switch to have more control too as docker can be difficult to set up some stuff that the devs don't really planned to.
So here's my thoughts and slowly I'm going to leave docker for more old-school way of hosting services. Don't get me wrong docker is awesome in some use cases, the main are that is really portable and simple to deploy no hundreds dependencies, etc. And by this I think I really found how docker could be useful, not for every single homelabing setup, and it's not my case.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong but I let you talk about it in the comments, thx.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Docker compose plus using external volume mounts or using the docker volume + tar backup method is superior

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Can be but I'm not enough free, and this way I run lxc containers directly onto proxmox

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

You’re basically adding a ton of overhead to your services for no reason though

Realistically you should be doing docker inside LXC for a best of both worlds approach

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

I accept the way of doing, docker or lxc but docker in a lxc is not suitable for me, I already tried it and I've got terrible performance

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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. It’s 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. I’ve lost count of the number of VMs I’ve setup following installation guidelines, and missed a single step - so machines that should be identical aren’t. I do however understand the frustration with it when you first start, but IMO stick with it as the benefits are huge.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

And I've done the exact opposite moves everything off of lxc to docker containers. So much easier and nicer less machines to maintain.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

Less "machines" but you need to maintain docker containers at the end

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I've never really like the convoluted docker tooling. And I've been hit a few times with a docker image uodates just breaking everything (looking at you nginx reverse proxy manager...). Now I've converted everything to nixos services/containers. And i couldn't be happier with the ease of configuration and control. Backup is just.a matter of pushing my flake to github and I'm done.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

Already said but I need to try NixOS one day, this thing seems to worth it

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (4 children)

I used docker for my homeserver for several years, but managing everything with a single docker compose file that I edit over SSH became too tiring, so I moved to kubernetes using k3s. Painless setup, and far easier to control and monitor remotely. The learning curve is there, but I already use kubernetes at work. It's way easier to setup routing and storage with k3s than juggling volumes was with docker, for starters.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

What are really the differences between docker and kubernetes?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

Both are ways to manage containers, and both can use the same container runtime provider, IIRC. They are different in how they manage the containers, with docker/docker-compose being suited for development or one-off services, and kubernetes being more suitable for running and managing a bunch of containers in production, across machines, etc. Think of kubernetes as the pokemon evolution of docker.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Isn’t it more effort to setup kubernetes? At work I also use k8s with Helm, Traefik, Ingress but we have an infra team that handles the details and I’m kind of afraid of having to handle the networking etc. myself. Docker-compose feels easier to me somehow.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Setting up k8s with k3s is barely two commands. Works out of the box without any further config. Heck, even a multi-node cluster is pretty straightforward to setup. That's what we're using at work.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I did come across it before, but it feels like just another layer of abstraction over k8s, and with a smaller ecosystem. Also, I prefer terminal to web UI.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Fair. It does make bundling networks easy though.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

...a single compose file?!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Several services are interlinked, and I want to share configs across services. Docker doesn't provide a clean interface for separating and bundling network interfaces, storage, and containers like k8s.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Just run docker in an LXC. That's what I do when I have to.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Not working good on my side, performance issues

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Yeah I share your point of view and I think I'm going this way. These scripts are awesome but I prefer writing mine as I get more control over them

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

i'm using all of this yeah

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