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?
Currently no virtualisation at all - just my OS on bare metal with some apps installed. Remember, this is a single machine sitting in my basement running Samba and a couple of other things - there’s not much to orchestrate :-)
Oh, I thought you had multiple machines.
I use docker because each service I use requires different libraries with different versions. With containers, that doesn’t matter. It also provides some rudimentary security. If an attacker gets in, they’ll have to break out of the container first to get at the rest of the system. Each container can run with a different user, so even if they do get out of the container, at worst they’ll be able to destroy the data they have access to - well, they’ll still see other stuff in the network, but I think it’s better than being straight pwned.
It makes deployments a lot easier once you have the groundwork laid (writing your compose files). If you ever need to nuke the OS reinstalling and configuring 20+ apps can only take a few minutes (assuming you still have the config data, which should live outside of the container).
For example, setting up my mediaserver, webserver, SQL server, and usenet suit of apps can take a few hours to do natively. Using Docker Compose it takes one command and about 5-10 minutes. Granted, I had to spend a few hours writing the compose files and testing everything, along with storing the config data, but just simply backing up the compose files with git means I can pull everything down quickly. Even if I don’t have the config files anymore it probably only takes like an hour or less to configure everything.