Selfhosted

Yes. Let me give you an example on why it is very nice: I migrated one of my machines at home from an old x86-64 laptop to an arm64 odroid this week. I had a couple of applications running, 8 or 9 of them, all organized in a docker compose file with all persistent storage volumes mapped to plain folders in a directory. All I had to do was stop the compose setup, copy the folder structure, install docker on the new machine and start the compose setup. There was one minor hickup since I forgot that one of the containers was built locally but since all the other software has arm64 images available under the same name, it just worked. Changed the host IP and done.

One of the very nice things is the portability of containers, as well as the reproducibility (within limits) of the applications, since you divide them into stateless parts (the container) and stateful parts (the volumes), definitely give it a go!

Ive worked in enterprise and government as a software engineer and docker has been the defacto standard everywhere since at least 5 years now. It's not going away soon.

Why wouldn't you want to use containers? I'm curious. What do you use now? Ansible? Puppet? Chef?

Nixos, nixos, nixos 🤌

Docker is nice for things that have complex installations and I want a very specific implementation that I don't plan to tweak very much. Otherwise, it's more hassle than it's worth. There are lots of networking issues like limited/experimental support for IPv6, and too much is hidden and preconfigured, making it difficult to make adjustments that would otherwise just be a config file change.

So it is good for products like a mail server where you want to use the exact software they use like let's say postfix + dovecot + roundcube + nginix + acme + MySQL + spam assassin + amavisd, etc. But you want to use an existing reverse proxy and cert it setup, or want to use a different spam filter or database and it becomes a huge hassle.

Yeh, I'm not a system admin in any meaning of the word, but docker is so simple that even I got around to figuring it out and to me it just exists to save time and prevent headaches (dependency hell)

I think it's a good tool to have on your toolbelt, so it can't hurt to look into it.

Whether you will like it or not, and whether you should move your existing stuff to it is another matter. I know us old Unix folk can be a fussy bunch about new fads (I started as a Unix admin in the late 90s myself).

Personally, I find docker a useful tool for a lot of things, but I also know when to leave the tool in the box.

If you have homelab and not using containers - you are missing out A LOT! Docker-compose is beautiful thing for homelab. <3

As someone who is not a former sysadmin and only vaguely familiar with *nix, I’ve been able to turn my home NAS (bought strictly to hold photos and videos backed up from our phones) into a home media sever by installing Docker, learning how the yml files work, how containers network, etc, and it’s been awesome.

I hate it very much. I am sure it is due to my limited understanding of it, but I've been stuck on some things that were very easy for me using VM.

We have two networks, one of which has very limited internet connectivity, behind proxy. When using VMs, I used to configure everything: code, files, settings on a machine with no restrictions; shut it down; move the VM files to the restricted network; boot and be happily on my way.

I'm unable to make this work with docker. Getting my Ubuntu server fetch its updates behind proxy is easy enough; setting it for python Pip is another level; realising the specific python libraries need special keys to work around proxies is yet another; figuring out how to get it done for Docker and python under it is when I gave up. Why can it not be as simple as the VM!

Maybe I'm not looking using the right terms or maybe I should go and learn docker "properly", but there is no doubt that using Docker is much more difficult for my use case than using VMs.

I would never go back installing something without docker. Never.

No. Docker is proprietary

Try other container technologies lie LXC or go right side and play with FreeBSD jails. Quality of dockers you can find around is horrendous, giving that Docker itself build for convenience not security. It is not something I will trust.