I’m a retired Unix admin. It was my job from the early '90s until the mid '10s. I’ve kept somewhat current ever since by running various machines at home. So far I’ve managed to avoid using Docker at home even though I have a decent understanding of how it works - I stopped being a sysadmin in the mid '10s, I still worked for a technology company and did plenty of “interesting” reading and training.

It seems that more and more stuff that I want to run at home is being delivered as Docker-first and I have to really go out of my way to find a non-Docker install.

I’m thinking it’s no longer a fad and I should invest some time getting comfortable with it?

  • Terrasque@infosec.pubEnglish
    0·
    11 months ago

    Nine. How much ram do they use? How much disk space? Try running 90, or 900. Currently, on my personal hobby kubernetes cluster, there’s 83 different instances running. Because of the low overhead, I can run even small tools in their own container, completely separate from the rest. If I run say… a postgresql server… spinning one up takes 90mb disk space for the image, and about 15 mb ram.

    I worked at a company that did - among other things - hosting, and was using VM’s for easier management and separation between customers. I wasn’t directly involved in that part day to day, but was friend with the main guy there. It was tough to manage. He was experimenting with automatic creating and setting up new VM’s, stripping them for unused services and files, and having different sub-scripts for different services. This was way before docker, but already then admins were looking in that direction.

    So aschually, docker is kinda made for people who runs things in VM’s, because that is exactly what they were looking for and duct taping things together for before docker came along.

    • Shdwdrgn@mander.xyzEnglish
      0·
      11 months ago

      Yeah I can see the advantage if you’re running a huge number of instances. In my case it’s all pretty small scale. At work we only have a single server that runs a web site and database so my home setup puts that to shame, and even so I have a limited number of services I’m working with.

      • Terrasque@infosec.pubEnglish
        0·
        11 months ago

        Yeah, it also has the effect that when starting up say a new postgres or web server is one simple command, a few seconds and a few mb of disk and ram, you do it more for smaller stuff.

        Instead of setting up one nginx for multiple sites you run one nginx per site and have the settings for that as part of the site repository. Or when a service needs a DB, just start a new one just for that. And if that file analyzer ran in it’s own image instead of being part of the web service, you could scale that separately… oh, and it needs a redis instance and a rabbitmq server, that’s two more containers, that serves just that web service. And so on…

        Things that were a huge hassle before, like separate mini vm’s for each sub-service, and unique sub-services for each service doesn’t just become practical but easy. You can define all the services and their relations in one file and docker will recreate the whole stack with all services with one command.

        And then it also gets super easy to start more than one of them, for example for testing or if you have a different client. … which is how you easily reach a hundred instances running.

        So instead of a service you have a service blueprint, which can be used in service stack blueprints, which allows you to set up complex systems relatively easily. With a granularity that would traditionally be insanity for anything other than huge, serious big-company deployments.

        • MaximilianKohler@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          7 months ago

          Instead of setting up one nginx for multiple sites you run one nginx per site and have the settings for that as part of the site repository.

          Doesn’t that require a lot of resources since you’re running (mysql, nginx, etc.) numerous times (once for each container), instead of once globally?

          Or, per your comment below:

          Since the base image is static, and config is per container, one image can be used to run multiple containers. So if you have a postgres image, you can run many containers on that image. And specify different config for each instance.

          You’d only have two instances of postgres, for example, one for all docker containers and one global/server-wide? Still, that doubles the resources used no?