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?
I never use it for databases. I find I don’t gain much from containerizing it, because the interesting and difficult bits of customizing and tayloring a database to your needs are on the data file system or in kernel parameters, not in the database binaries themselves. On most distributions it’s trivial to install the binaries for postgres/mariadb or whatnot.
Databases are usually fairly resource intensive too, so you’d want a separate VM for it anyway.
Very good points.
In my case I just need to for a couple users with maybe a few dozen transactions a day; it’s far from being a bottleneck and there’s little point in optimizing it further.
Containerizing it also has the benefit of boiling all installation and configuration into one very convenient dockercompose file… Actually two. I use one with all the config stuff that’s published to gitea and one that has sensitive data.