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.
I used docker for my homeserver for several years, but managing everything with a single docker compose file that I edit over SSH became too tiring, so I moved to kubernetes using k3s. Painless setup, and far easier to control and monitor remotely. The learning curve is there, but I already use kubernetes at work. It’s way easier to setup routing and storage with k3s than juggling volumes was with docker, for starters.
What are really the differences between docker and kubernetes?
Both are ways to manage containers, and both can use the same container runtime provider, IIRC. They are different in how they manage the containers, with docker/docker-compose being suited for development or one-off services, and kubernetes being more suitable for running and managing a bunch of containers in production, across machines, etc. Think of kubernetes as the pokemon evolution of docker.
…a single compose file?!
Several services are interlinked, and I want to share configs across services. Docker doesn’t provide a clean interface for separating and bundling network interfaces, storage, and containers like k8s.
Did you try portainer?
I did come across it before, but it feels like just another layer of abstraction over k8s, and with a smaller ecosystem. Also, I prefer terminal to web UI.
Fair. It does make bundling networks easy though.
Isn’t it more effort to setup kubernetes? At work I also use k8s with Helm, Traefik, Ingress but we have an infra team that handles the details and I’m kind of afraid of having to handle the networking etc. myself. Docker-compose feels easier to me somehow.
Setting up k8s with k3s is barely two commands. Works out of the box without any further config. Heck, even a multi-node cluster is pretty straightforward to setup. That’s what we’re using at work.