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?

  • sylver_dragon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    3 days ago

    I started self hosting in the days well before containers (early 2000’s). Having been though that hell, I’m very happy to have containers.
    I like to tinker with new things and with bare metal installs this has a way of adding cruft to servers and slowly causing the system to get into an unstable state. That’s my own fault, but I’m a simple person who likes simple solutions. There are also the classic issues with dependency hell and just flat out incompatible software. While these issues have gotten much better over the years, isolating applications avoids this problem completely. It also makes OS and hardware upgrades less likely to break stuff.

    These days, I run everything in containers. My wife and I play games like Valheim together and I have a Dockerfile template I use to build self-hosted serves in a container. The Dockerfile usually just requires a few tweaks for AppId, exposed ports and mount points for save data. That paired with a docker-compose.yaml (also built off a template) means I usually have a container up and running in fairly short order. The update process could probably be better, I currently just rebuild the image, but it gets the job done.