Selfhosted

Docker is good when combined with gVisor runtime for better isolation.

Sydbox OCI runtime is also cool and faster than gVisor (both are quick)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

I don’t like docker. It’s hard to update containers, hard to modify specific settings, hard to configure network settings, just overall for me I’ve had a bad experience. It’s fantastic for quickly spinning things up but for long term usecase and customizing it to work well with all my services, I find it lacking.

I just create Debian containers or VMs for my different services using Proxmox. I have full control over all settings that I didn’t have in docker.

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.

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 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.

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.