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Self-hosting is having a moment. Ethan Sholly knows why.
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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That's half the point of the container... You let an expert set it up so you don't have to know it on that level. You can manage fast more containers this way.
OK, but I'd rather be the expert.
And I have no troubling spinning up new services, fast. Currently sitting at around ~30 Internet-facing services, 0 docker containers, and reproducing those installs from scratch + restoring backups would be a single command plus waiting 5 minutes.
Fair, but others, unless they are getting paid for it, just want their shit to work. Same as people who take their cars to a mechanic instead of wrenching on it themselves, or calling a handyman when stuff breaks at home. There's nothing wrong with that.
I literally get paid to do this type of work and there is no way for me to be an expert in all the services that our platform runs. Again, that's kind of the point. Let the person who writes the container be the expert. I'll provide the platform, the maintenance, upgrades, etc.. the developer can provide the expertise in their app.
A lot of times it is necessary to build the container oneself, e.g., to fix a bug, satisfy a security requirement, or because the container as-built just isn’t compatible with the environment. So in that case would you contract an expert to rebuild it, host it on a VM, look for a different solution, or something else?
It's not like it's so hard to rebuild a container for the occasional services that needs it. but it's still much better than needing to do it with every single service
It depends on the container I suppose. There are some that are very difficult to rebuild depending on what’s in it and what it does. Some very complex software can be ran in containers.
Yep, some people sort of miss the point of microservices and make some fairly monolithic containers. Or they're legacy apps being shoehorned into a container. Some things still require handholding. FreeIPA is a good example. They have a container version, but it's just a monolithic install in a container and only recommended for testing.
Containerfiles are super easy to write. For the most part if you can do it in a VM, you can do it in a container. This sort of thing is why you would move to containers. Instead of being the "expert" in all the apps you run, you can focus on the things that actually need your attention.
Is that with Ansible or your own tooling or something else?
NixOS :)
Maybe I should have clarified that liking bare-metal does not imply disliking abstraction
I’ve been wanting to tinker with NixOS. I’ve stuck in the stone ages automating VM deployments on my Proxmox cluster using ansible. One line and about 30 minutes (cuda install is a beast) to build a reproducible VM running llama.cpp with llama-swap.
Nice. My partner has a Proxmox setup, so we've adapted the Nix config to spin up new VMs of any machine with a single command.
30, that's cute. I currently have 70 containers running on my home server. That doesn't include any lab I run or the stuff I use at work. Containers make life much easier. I also guarantee you don't know those apps as well as you think you do either. Just being able to install and configure something doesn't mean you know the inner workings of them. I used to do the same thing you do. Eventually, I would rather spend my time doing other things or learning certain things more in-depth and be okay with a working knowledge of others. It can be fun and rewarding to do things the hard way but don't kid yourself and think you're somehow superior for doing it that way.
Containers != services.
I don't think I am better than anyone. I jumped into these comments because docker was pushed as superior, unprompted.
Installing and configuring does not an expert make, agreed; but that's not what I said.
I would say I'm pretty knowledgeable about the things I host though, seeing as I am a contributor and / or package maintainer for a number of them...
Correct, not all containers are for services. I would never say that docker is superior. I would however say that containers are (I can be pedantic too). They're version-controlled, they come with the correct dependencies, etc... There are many reasons why developing with containers is superior and I'm sure you're aware of them already. Everyone is moving to do exactly that. There are always edge cases, but those are few and far between these days.