And there is an extra perk: Unlike cloud services, system skills and knowledge are portable. Once you learn how systemd or ufw or ssh works, you can apply it to any other system.
I’d even go as far as to say that the time/cost required to say learn the quirks of Docker and containers and layering builds is higher than what is needed to learn how to administer a website on a Debian server.
Well said. For me, "how to administer a website on a Debian server" is a must if you work in Web Dev because hosting a web app should not require you to depend on anyone else.
>I’d even go as far as to say that the time/cost required to say learn the quirks of Docker and containers and layering builds is higher than what is needed to learn how to administer a website on a Debian server.
But that is irrelevant as Docker brings more to the table that a simple Debian server cannot by design. One could argue that lxd is sufficient for these, but that is even more hassle than Docker.
For my home or personal server stuff... I'm pretty much using ProxMox as a VM host, with Ubuntu Server as the main server and mostly Docker configured with Caddy installed on the host. Most apps are stacked in /apps/appname/docker-compose.yaml with data directories mounted underneath. This just tends to simplify most of my backup/restore/migrate etc.
I just don't have the need to do a lot of work on the barebones server beyond basic ufw and getting Caddy and Docker running... Caddy will reverse-proxy all the apps running in containers. It really simplifies my setup.
That's essentially what I do (with a little extra step of having a dedicated server in Hetzner peered with my homelab with wireguard to use as internet facing proxy + offsite backup server).
Ah, also docker is managed with komo.do, but otherwise it is simple GUI over docker-compose
That's cool... I really should take a next step to bridge my home setup with my OVH server. It's a mixed bag, mostly in that the upgrade to "business" class from home is more than what I pay a month to rent the full server and IP block on OVH... But I've got a relatively big NAS at home I wouldn't mind leveraging more/better.
Aside: I really want to like NextCloud, but as much as I like aspects of it, I don't like plenty as well.
I think the original vision where containers "abstract" the platform to such an extend that you can basically deploy your dev environment has been somewhat diminished. The complexity of the ecosystem has grown to such an extend, that we need tools to manage the tools that help us manage our services.
And that's not even considering the "tied to a single corporation" problem. If us-east-1 wakes up tomorrow and decides to become gyliat-prime-1, we're all screwed because no more npm, no more docker, no more CloudFlare (because someone convinced everyone to deploy captchas etc).