Kubernetes. For a homelab, the stripped-down k3s is fantastic and surprisingly easy to get going.
Once you've got Kubernetes set up, you can lean on all the many tools already out there for things like deploying complex projects (Helm) and monitoring (Prometheus/Grafana). OpenLens is a nice piece of software you can use to monitor and control your cluster too, as is k9s.
What do you use for repeatable recovery and deployment of systems?
I've looked at ArgoCD and FlexCD. ArgoCD was too flaky. When I made changes to helm files it would often fail to deploy them and the UI often wouldn't really show the detailed errors from things like helm syntax errors, so it was a pain to troubleshoot.
FlexCD was just really a pain to configure in the first-place and I didn't want to learn kustomize when I already have helm charts.
And neither really supported staged deployments or dealt with dependant services well. So I couldn't get it to deploy the infrastructure level helm charts like PostgreSQL before deploying the services that depend on it. Technically, with Kubernetes it shouldn't matter about the order of deployment but in reality when ArgoCD would deploy the other stuff first and wait for it to come up and it never came up because the dependencies weren't there, it caused it to choke a lot.
Just an example of the issues I've had. But I really want an easy way to make lots of small changes to charts and deploy them quickly as well as being able to quickly recover the cluster from backups if something catastrophic happens like a fire without having to manually deploy each chart. Just curious how others handle it or if it's always manual deployment of charts via CLI only.
Might take a little bit of effort to do a conversion if you're locked into explicitly how Docker interacts with OCI containers, but over in the Podman camp you have two options.
Other than that, the more usable solutions I've tried of graphical Docker container management interfaces would be the ones in Unraid and Proxmox, though those solutions may not be suitable depending on your use case and have their own caveats to be aware of.
I personally like dockge, it’s simple and lightweight and I like the fact that the webui has a good phone interface.
I personally have switched over to Komodo after using portainer for years. Never looking back, I love it. Works perfectly and can do GUI, compose files, and repos for docker. I also have multiple machines running stuff and it let's me fiddle with everything in one UI.
Podman pods (or quadlets) managed by ansible.
I recently moved from docker compose to podman quadlets. Took a bit of effort, but fully foss, and for me it's set and forget. Have about 30 containers across about 12 services. Have them set to auto update and it all runs through systemd.
This is the direction I'm headed. Goodbye docker. Quadlets everywhere. Im in the process of converting docker run scripts currently. Any tips or gotchas you can share that you learned?
I'd absolutely recommend Kubernetes (k3s/rke2) or podman quadlets. Quadlets are a lot easier to get started with, but are still very flexible.
I'd recommend against using portainer. I tried it quite recently and I did not like it at all. A lot of features are paywalled, and was overall just a frustrating experience. I've heard it was a lot better some years ago.
Dockhand is great. I haven't touched Portainer ever since.
https://github.com/Finsys/dockhand
Thanks, what have you liked about switching to this from portainer?
I just recently switched from portainer to dockhand and I really like it. The UI is great and the setup and config wasn’t too complicated. I like that I can put both of my servers into one instance and can update all of my containers from dockhand vs manually. The other thing I like is being able to view the logs for my containers. Idk if it’s a me thing, but whenever I would try to view logs in portainer I would never be able to scroll up as it would update and send me back to the bottom. Again, I could’ve just been doing something wrong, but it always bothered me and I don’t have that issue with dockhand.
Uncheck auto update/refresh in top right corner
Thank you
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