Hi! Question in the title.
I get that its super easy to setup. But its really worthwhile to have something that:
- runs everything as root (not many well built images with proper useranagement it seems)
- you cannot really know which stuff is in the images: you must trust who built it
- lots of mess in the system (mounts, fake networks, rules…)
I always host on bare metal when I can, but sometimes (immich, I look at you!) Seems almost impossible.
I get docker in a work environment, but on self hosted? Is it really worth while? I would like to hear your opinions fellow hosters.
Why docker?
Its all about companies re-creating and reconfiguring the way people develop software so everyone will be hostage of their platforms. We see this in everything now Docker/DockerHub/Kubernetes and GitHub actions were the first sign of this cancer.
We now have a generation of developers that doesn’t understand the basic of their tech stack, about networking, about DNS, about how to deploy a simple thing into a server that doesn’t use some Docker or isn’t a 3rd party cloud xyz deploy-from-github service.
True, but this Docker hype invariably and inevitably leads people down a path that will then require some proprietary solution or dependency somewhere that is only required because the “new” technology itself alone doesn’t deliver as others did in the past. In this particular case is Docker Hub / Kubernetes BS and all the cloud garbage around it.
It doesn’t really matter if there are truly open-source and open ecosystems of containerization technologies because in the end people/companies will pick the proprietary / closed option just because “it’s easier to use” or some other specific thing that will be good on the short term and very bad on the long term. This happened with CentOS vs Debian is currently unfolding with Docker vs LXC/RKT/Podman and will happen with Ubuntu vs Debian for all those who moved from CentOS to Ubuntu.
Yes, a total mess of devices hard to audit, constant ram wasting and worse than all it isn’t as easy change a docker image / develop things as it used to be.
This is a really bad take. I’m all for OSS, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t value with things like Docker.
Yes, developers know less about infra. I’d argue that can be a good thing. I don’t need my devs to understand VLANs, the nuances of DNS, or any of that. I need them to code, and code well. That’s why we have devops/infra people. If my devs to know it? Awesome, but docker and containerization allows them to focus on code and let my ops teams figure out how they want to put it in production.
As for OSS - sure, someone can come along and make an OSS solution. Until then - I don’t really care. Same thing with cloud providers. It’s all well and good to have opinions about OSS, but when it comes to companies being able to push code quickly and scalably, then yeah I’m hiring the ops team who knows kubernetes and containerization vs someone who’s going to spend weeks trying to spin up bare iron machines.
Is all this true? Its a perspective I didn’t considered, but feels true, don’t know if it is tough.
It’s not true. I mean sure there are companies that try to lock you into their platforms but there’s no grand conspiracy of the lizard people the way OP makes it sound.
Different people want different things from software. Professionals may prefer rootless podman or whatever but a home user probably doesn’t have the same requirements and the same high bar. They can make do with regular docker or with running things on the metal. It’s up to each person to evaluate what’s best for them. There’s no “One True Way” of hosting software services.