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.
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 😁
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.
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.