Hi! Question in the title.
I get that its super easy to setup. But its really worthwhile to have something that:
- runs everything as root (not many well built images with proper useranagement it seems)
- you cannot really know which stuff is in the images: you must trust who built it
- lots of mess in the system (mounts, fake networks, rules…)
I always host on bare metal when I can, but sometimes (immich, I look at you!) Seems almost impossible.
I get docker in a work environment, but on self hosted? Is it really worth while? I would like to hear your opinions fellow hosters.
It doesn’t really matter if there are truly open-source and open ecosystems of containerization technologies because in the end people/companies will pick the proprietary / closed option just because “it’s easier to use” or some other specific thing that will be good on the short term and very bad on the long term. This happened with CentOS vs Debian is currently unfolding with Docker vs LXC/RKT/Podman and will happen with Ubuntu vs Debian for all those who moved from CentOS to Ubuntu.
It cuts both ways. Less commercial interest means only hobby level development (which can be high quality, but is typically slow and unpolished for users).
So you can spend your energy on making up the gap between the ease of use of the commercially supported software and the pure volunteer projects or you can have free time for things you’re more interested in and jump ship when they squeeze too hard for cash.
Podman is developed by RedHat: https://github.com/containers/podman/graphs/contributors
Podman supports Docker images and makes things easier for users in doing so.
What’s the issue with podman?
In my personal experience, it’s just not as fully featured.
What is it missing that all the benefits wouldn’t make up?
Lots of docker guides + documentation just don’t work, specifically with podman-compose. The networking options are not fully featured, I ended up having to rig up a bunch of kubernetes services just to be able to use my VPN as a network bridge for my media server stack. I got podman working eventually because I think it’s neat, but it definitely would have been twice as easy to just use docker.
Yes, podman documentation is still sparse at the moment