Currently I’m running some services though Docker on a Proxmox VM. Before I had Proxmox, I thought containers were a very clean way of organizing my system. I’m currently wondering if I can just install the services I always use on the VM directly. What are the pros and cons of that?
Cons of containers are slightly worse disk and memory consumption.
Pros:
Stick with the containers
with containers, software maintainers also need to keep their image up-to-date with latest security fixes (most of them don’t) - whereas these are usually handled by unattended-upgrades or similar in a VM. Then put out a new release and expect users to upgrade ASAP. Or rebuild and encourage redeploying the
latestimage every day or so, which is bad for other reasons (no warning for breaking changes, the software must be tested thoroughly after every commit tomaster).In short this adds the burden of proper OS/image maintenance for developers, something usually handled by distro maintainers.
trivy is helpful in assessing the maintenance/vulnerability level of OCI images.
Wait, ease of installation? As someone who had to walk away from a semi-homebrew, mildly complicated cloud storage setup recently, that’s not the experience I had. Networks within networks, networks next to networks not talking to each other, mapped volumes, even checking logs is made more complicated by containerising. Sure, I’m a noob, but that only reinforces my point.
I definitely see your point, but the difference is that it’s one thing to learn. Once you know docker, you can deploy and manage anything.