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I'm actually doing the opposite :)
I've been using vms, lxc containers and docker for years. In the last 3 years or so, I've slowly moved to just docker containers. I still have a few vms, of course, but they only run docker :)
Containers are a breeze to update, there is no dependency hell, no separate vms for each app...
More recently, I've been trying out kubernetes. Mostly to learn and experiment, since I use it at work.
And I've done the exact opposite moves everything off of lxc to docker containers. So much easier and nicer less machines to maintain.
Less "machines" but you need to maintain docker containers at the end
For me the power of docker is its inherent immutability. I want to be able to move a service around without having to manual tinker, install packages and change permissions etc. Itβs repeatable and reliable. However, to get to the point of understanding enough about it to do this reliably can be a huge investment of time. As a daily user of docker (and k8s) I would use it everyday over a VM. Iβve lost count of the number of VMs Iβve setup following installation guidelines, and missed a single step - so machines that should be identical arenβt. I do however understand the frustration with it when you first start, but IMO stick with it as the benefits are huge.
Yeah docker is great for this and it's really a pleasure to deploy apps so quickly but the problems comes later, if you want to really customize the service to you, you can't instead of doing your own image...
In most cases you can get away with over mounting configuration files within the container. In extreme cases you can build your own image - but the steps for that are just the changes you would have applied manually on a VM. At least that image is repeatable and you can bring it up somewhere else without having to manually apply all those changes in a panic.
Are you using docker-compose and local bind mounts? I'd not, you're making backing up uch harder than it needs to be. Its certainly easier than backing up LXCs and a whole lot easier to restore.
Docker is a convoluted mess of overlays and truly weird network settings. I found that I have no interest in application containers and would much prefer to set up multiple services in a system container (or VM) as if it was a bare-metal server. I deploy a small Proxmox cluster with Proxmox Backup Server in a CT on each node and often use scripts from https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/. Everything is automatically backed up (and remote sync'd twice) with a deduplication factor of 10. A Dockerless Homelab FTW!
Docker compose plus using external volume mounts or using the docker volume + tar backup method is superior
Can be but I'm not enough free, and this way I run lxc containers directly onto proxmox
Youβre basically adding a ton of overhead to your services for no reason though
Realistically you should be doing docker inside LXC for a best of both worlds approach
I accept the way of doing, docker or lxc but docker in a lxc is not suitable for me, I already tried it and I've got terrible performance
Just run docker in an LXC. That's what I do when I have to.
Not working good on my side, performance issues
I've never really like the convoluted docker tooling. And I've been hit a few times with a docker image uodates just breaking everything (looking at you nginx reverse proxy manager...). Now I've converted everything to nixos services/containers. And i couldn't be happier with the ease of configuration and control. Backup is just.a matter of pushing my flake to github and I'm done.
Already said but I need to try NixOS one day, this thing seems to worth it
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.
I use podman using home-manager configs, I could run the services natively but currently I have a user for each service that runs the podman containers. This way each service is securely isolated from each other and the rest of the system. Maybe if/when NixOS supports good selinux rules I'll switch back to running it native.
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.
Isnβt 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 Iβm 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.
I love docker, and backups are a breeze if you're using ZFS or BTRFS with volume sending. That is the bummer about docker, it relies on you to back it up instead of having its native backup system.