Hello! 😀
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 🙃
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.
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.
using docker compose yeah. I find hard to tweak the network and the apps settings it’s like putting obstacles on my road
Its networking is a bit hard to tweak, but I also dont find I need to most of the time. And when I do, its usually just setting the network to host and calling it done.
Docker as a technology is a misguided mess but it is an effective tool.
Podman is a much better design that solves the same problem.
Containers can be used well or very poorly.
Docker makes it easy to ship something without knowing anything about System Engineering which some see as an advantage, but I don’t.
At my shop, we use almost no public container images because they tend to be a security nightmare.
We build our own images in-house with strict rules about what can go inside. Otherwise it would be absolute chaos.