also curious abt this
this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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I have a pretty low power server at home (Pentium G4560), and the previous one was even slower J3160, so I don't want to unnecessarily hog the CPU with a VM, and the few services I need at home run perfectly fine in containers.
I run pihole, unbound, wireguard, plex, unifi controller in containers, and I run some additional services directly on the host (samba, transmission).
I have a Windows VM on my Windows PC for work, so it's isolated from my main rig (various VPN clients and work files etc), and if I needed some Linux stuff on my Windows PC I'd also run a VM, but more VMs also mean more updating and patching, which is much easier with containers.
If it's relevant to your actual job, learning to use k8s will benefit you more. Generally i'd prefer to keep the bare metal OS as clean as possible to avoid breaking anything during upgrades and such, and keep the containers and normal running apps on separate VMs that can communicate with eachothers, k8s is mostly good if you got a lot of servers and want to manage them all at once through a single "orchestrator". But for self hosting stuff in your home it's kinda overkill. But it still can be used to manage things up. So imo go for k8s since it can be used in homeservers, it's just that it's kinda like using a nuclear bomb to kill a wasp.
VMs if you have enough RAM and/or need to run something on a non-compatible system (like pfsense on ARM). Containers for everything else.
Why not do both? I run proxmox on my physical hardware, then have guest VMs within proxmox that run k8s.
Advantages of proxmox:
- Proxmox makes it easy to spin up VMs for non self host purposes (say I want to play with NixOS)
- Proxmox snapshots make migrations and configuration changes a bit safer (I recently messed up a postgres 15 migration and was able to roll back in a button press)
You can then just run docker images through Proxmox, but I like k8s (specifically k3s) because:
Advantages of k8s:
- Certmanager means your HTTP services automatically get assigned TLS certs essentially for free (once you've set up cert manager for the first time, anyway)
- I find k8s' YML-based configuration easier to track and manage. I can spin my containers up fresh just from my config, without worrying about stray environment settings I might not have backed up.
- k8s makes it easy for me to reason about which services are exposed internally to each other, and which are exposed on the host outside of my k8s cluster.
- k8s services get persistent DNS and IPs within the cluster, so configuring nodes to talk to each other is very easy.
And yeah, this way I get to learn two technologies rather than one 😁
I am more comfortable using Ansible and Terraform, so I find VMs more suited for me. Though for random nodejs or PHP apps, I do put them in postman containers and pods.