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Kubernetes? docker-compose? How should I organize my container services in 2024? (lemmy.world)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Currently, I run Unraid and have all of my services' setup there as docker containers. While this is nice and easy to setup initially, it has some major downsides:

It's fragile. Unraid is prone to bugs/crashes with docker that take down my containers. It's also not resilient so when things break I have to log in and fiddle.
It's mutable. I can't use any infrastructure-as-code tools like terraform, and configuration sort of just exist in the UI. I can't really roll back or recover easily.
It's single-node. Everything is tied to my one big server that runs the NAS, but I'd rather have the NAS as a separate fairly low-power appliance and then have a separate machine to handle things like VMs and containers.

So I'm looking ahead and thinking about what the next iteration of my homelab will look like. While I like unraid for the storage stuff, I'm a little tired of wrangling it into a container orchestrator and hypervisor, and I think this year I'll split that job out to a dedicated machine. I'm comfortable with, and in fact prefer, IaC over fancy UIs and so would love to be able to use terraform or Pulumi or something like that. I would prefer something multi-node, as I want to be able to tie multiple machines together. And I want something that is fault-tolerant, as I host services for friends and family that currently require a lot of manual intervention to fix when they go down.

So the question is: how do you all do this? Kubernetes, docker-compose, Hashicorp Nomad? Do you run k3s, Harvester, or what? I'd love to get an idea of what people are doing and why, so I can get some ideas as to what I might do.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Portainer + caddy + watchtower, this will give you the benefits of containers without the complexity of Kubernetes. As someone who professionally works with Kubernetes, I agree with what other people have said here: “only run it if you want to learn it for professional use”.

Portainer is a friendly UI for running containers. It supports docker compose as well. It helps with observability and ops.
Caddy is an easy proxy with automatic Let’s Encrypt support.
Watchtower will update and restart your containers if there’s an update.
(Edit: formatting)