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?
Pure bare metal is crazy to me. I run proxmox and mount my storage there, and from there it is shared to machines that need it. It would be convenient to do a pass through to TrueNAS, for some of the functions it provides but I don’t trust that my skills for that. I’d have kept TrueNAS on bare metal, but I need so little horsepower for my services that it would be a waste. I don’t think the trade offs of having TrueNAS run my virtualisation environment were really worth it.
My router is bare metal. It’s much simpler to handle the networking with a single physical device like that. Again, it would be convenient to set up opnsense in a VM for failover. but it introduces a bunch of complexity I don’t want or really need. The router typically goes down only for maintenance, not because it crashed or something. I don’t have redundant power or ISPs either.
To me, docker is an abstraction layer I don’t need. VMs are good enough, and proxmox does a good job with LXCs so far.
Why would I spin up a VM and virtual network within that vm and then a container when I can just spin up a VM?
I’ve not spent time learning Docker or k8s; it seems very much a tool designed for a scale that most companies don’t operate at let alone my home lab.
Containers run on “bare metal” in exactly the same way other processes on your system do. You can even see them in your process list FFS. They’re just running in different cgroup’s that limit access to resources.
Yes, I’ll die on this hill.
But, but, docker, kubernetes, hyper-scale convergence and other buzzwords from the 2010’s! These fancy words can’t just mean resource and namespace isolation!
In all seriousness, the isolation provided by containers is significant enough that administration of containers is different from running everything in the same OS. That’s different in a good way though, I don’t miss the bad old days of everything on a single server in the same space. Anyone else remember the joys of Windows Small Business Server? Let’s run Active Directory, Exchange and MSSQL on the same box. No way that will lead to prob… oh shit, the RAM is on fire.
…oh shit, the RAM is on fire.
The RAM. The RAM. The 🐏 is on fire. We don’t need no water let the mothefuxker burn.
Burn mothercucker, burn.
(Thanks phone for the spelling mistakes that I’m leaving).
Have done it both ways. Will never go back to bare metal. Dependency hell forced multiple clean installs down to bootloader.
The only constant is change.
My servers and NAS were created long before Docker was a thing, and as I am running them on a rolling release distribution there never was a reason to change anything. It works perfectly fine the way it is, and it will most likely run perfectly fine the next 10+ years too.
Well I am planning, when I find the time to research a good successor, to replace my aging HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 that I use as Homeserver/NAS. Maybe I will then setup everything clean and migrate the services to docker/podman/whatever is fancy then. But most likely I will only transfer all the disks and keep the old system running on newer hardware. Life is short…
I’ve been self-hosting since the '90s. I used to have an NT 3.51 server in my house. I had a dial in BBS that worked because of an extensive collection of .bat files that would echo AT commands to my COM ports to reset the modems between calls. I remember when we had to compile the slackware kernel from source to get peripherals to work.
But in this last year I took the time to seriously learn docker/podman, and now I’m never going back to running stuff directly on the host OS.
I love it because I can deploy instantly… Oftentimes in a single command line. Docker compose allows for quickly nuking and rebuilding, oftentimes saving your entire config to one or two files.
And if you need to slap in a traefik, or a postgres, or some other service into your group of containers, now it can be done in seconds completely abstracted from any kind of local dependencies. Even more useful, if you need to move them from one VPS to another, or upgrade/downgrade core hardware, it’s now a process that takes minutes. Absolutely beautiful.
I’m using proxmox now with lots of lxc containers. Prior to that, I used bare metal.
VMs were never really an option for me because the overhead is too high for the low power machines I use – my entire empire of dirt doesn’t have any fans, it’s all fanless PCs. More reliable, less noise, less energy, but less power to throw at things.
Stuff like docker I didn’t like because it never really felt like I was in control of my own system. I was downloading a thing someone else made and it really wasn’t intended for tinkering or anything. You aren’t supposed to build from source in docker as far as I can tell.
The nice thing about proxmox’s lxc implementation is I can hop in and change things or fix things as I desire. It’s all very intuitive, and I can still separate things out and run them where I want to, and not have to worry about keeping 15 different services running on the same version of whatever common services are required.
Actually docker is excellent for building from source. Some projects only come with instructions for building in Docker because it’s easier to make sure you have tested versions of tools.
It depends on the service and the desired level of it stack.
I generally will run services directly on things like a raspberry pi because VMs and containers offer added complexity that isn’t really suitable for the task.
At work, I run services in docker in VMs because the benefits far outweigh the complexity.
KISS
The more complicated the machine the more chances for failure.
Remote management plus bare metal just works, it’s very simple, and you get the maximum out of the hardware.
Depending on your use case that could be very important
It’s so simple that it takes so much less time, one day I may move to Podman but I need to have the time to learn. I host Jellyfin
It’s just another system to maintain, another link in the chain that can fail.
I run all my services on my personal gaming pc.
Containerisation is all the rage, but in reality it’s not needed at all for all but a tiny number of self hosters. If a native program option exists, it’s generally just easier and more performant to use that.
Docker and the like shine when you’re frequently deploying and destroying. If you’re doing that with your home server you’re doing it very wrong.
I like docker, I use it on my server, but I am more and more switching back to native apps. There’s just zero advantage to running most things in docker.
Containers are as performant as a native program because they are native programs.
Nope. If you use docker containers on windows or mac, they’re running using an abstraction layer. Docker is the native app, but what’s running inside them isn’t. At best they are nearly identical in performance with negligible hit to performance, but as soon as you use things like port forwarding the performance takes a hit.
I consider them unnecessary layers of abstraction. Why do I need to fiddle with Docker Compose to install Immich, Vaultwarden etc.? Wouldn’t it be simpler if I could just run
sudo apt install immich vaultwarden, just like I can dosudo apt install qbittorrent-noxtoday? I don’t think there’s anything that prohibits them from running on the same bare metal, actually I think they’d both run as well as in Docker (if not better because of lack of overhead)!Both your examples actually include their own bloat to accomplish the same thing that Docker would. They both bundle the libraries they depend on as part of the build
It’s not just libraries in a docker
Im a hobbiest who just learned how to self host my own static website on a spare laptop over the summer. I went with what I knew and was comfortable with which is a fresh install of linux and installing from the apt package manager.
As im getting more serious im starting to take another look at docker. Unforunately my OS package manager only has old outdated versions of docker I may need to reinstall with like ubuntu/debian LTS server something with more cutting edge software in repo. I don’t care much for building from scratch and navigating dependency roulette.
The fact that I bought all my machines used (and mostly on sale), and that not one of them is general purpose, id est, I bought each piece of hardware with a (more or less) concrete idea of what would be its use case. For example, my machine acting as a file server is way bigger and faster than my desktop, and I have a 20-year-old machine with very modest specs whose only purpose is being a dumb client for all the bigger servers. I develop programs in one machine and surf the internet and watch videos on the other. I have no use case for VMs besides the Logical Domains I setup in one of my SPARC hosts.
Why would I want add overheard and complexity to my system when I don’t need to? I can totally see legitimate use cases for docker, and work for purposes I use VMs constantly. I just don’t see a benefit to doing so at home.
Main benefit of Docker for home is Docker compose IMO. Makes it so easy to reuse your configuration
