Curious to know what the experiences are for those who are sticking to bare metal. Would like to better understand what keeps such admins from migrating to containers, Docker, Podman, Virtual Machines, etc. What keeps you on bare metal in 2025?
Curious to know what the experiences are for those who are sticking to bare metal. Would like to better understand what keeps such admins from migrating to containers, Docker, Podman, Virtual Machines, etc. What keeps you on bare metal in 2025?
That I’ve yet to see a containerization engine that actually makes things easier, especially once a service does fail or needs any amount of customization. I’ve two main services in docker, piped and webodm, both because I don’t have the time (read: am too lazy) to write a PKGBUILD. Yet, docker steals more time than maintaining a PKGBUILD, with random crashes (undebuggable, as the docker command just hangs when I try to start one specific container), containers don’t start properly after being updated/restarted by watchtower, and debugging any problem with piped is a chore, as logging in docker is the most random thing imagineable. With systemd, it’s in journalctl, or in /var/log if explicitly specified or obviously useful (eg. in multi-host nginx setups). With docker, it could be a logfile on the host, on the guest, or stdout. Or nothing, because, why log after all, when everything “just works”? (Yes, that’s a problem created by container maintainers, but one you can’t escape using docker. Or rather, in the time you have, you could more easily properly(!) install it bare metal) Also, if you want to use unix sockets to more closely manage permissions and prevent roleplaying a DHCP and DNS server for ports (by remembering which ports are used by which of the 25 or so services), you’ll either need to customize the container, or just use/write a PKGBUILD or similar for bare metal stuff.
Also, I need to host a python2.7 django 2.x or so webapp (yes, I’m rewriting it), which I do in a Debian 13 VM with Debian 9 and Debian 9 LTS repos, as it most closely resembles the original environment, and is the largest security risk in my setups, while being a public website. So into qemu it goes.
And, as I mentioned, either stuff is officially packaged by Arch, is in the AUR or I put it into the AUR.
A failed service gets killed and restarted. It should then work correctly.
If it fails to recover after being killed, then it’s not a service that’s fully ready for containerisation.
So, either build your recovery process to account for this… or fix it so it can recover.
It’s often why databases are run separately from the service. Databases can recover from this, and the services are stateless - doesn’t matter how many you run or restart.
As for customisation, if it isn’t exposed via env vars then it can’t be altered.
If you need something beyond the env vars, then you use that container as a starting point and make your customisation a part of your container build processes via a dockerfile (or equivalent)
It’s a bit like saying “chisels are great. But as soon as you need to cut a fillet steak, you need to sharpen a side of the chisel instead of the tip of the chisel”.
It’s using a chisel incorrectly.
Exactly. Therefore, docker is not useful for those purposes to me, as using arch packages (or similar) is easier to fulfill my needs.
You can customize and debug pretty easily, I’ve found. You can create your own Dockerfile based on one you’re using and add customizations there, and
execwill get you into the container.