There is a post about getting overwhelmed by 15 containers and people not wanting to turn the post into a container measuring contest.
But now I am curious, what are your counts? I would guess those of you running k*s would win out by pod scaling
docker ps | wc -l
For those wanting a quick count.
I’ve never even heard of NIX flakes before today. It looks like another soluion in search of a problem. I trust debian and I trust bare metal more than any container setup. I run multiple services on one machine. I currently have two machines to run all my services. No problems and no downtime other than a weekly update and reload. All crontabed, all automatic.
At work I have multiple services all running in KVM including some windows domain controllers. Also no problem and weekly full backups are a worry free. Only requiring me to checks them for consistency.
In short as much as people try to push containers they are only useful if you are dealing with more than few services. No home setup should be that large unless someong is hosting for others.
I disagree that Nix is a solution in search of a problem, in fact it solves arguably the two biggest problems in software deployment: dependency hell and reproducibility (i.e. the “It works on my machine” problem)
Every package gets access to the exact version of all the dependencies it needs (without needless replication like Flatpaks would have) and sharing a flake to another machine means you can replicate that exact setup and guarantee it will be exactly the same
Containers try to solve the same problems, and succeed to a somewhat decent extent, although with some overhead of course.
I’m not trying to criticize you or your setup at all, if Debian alone works for you, that’s fine. The beauty of open source and self hosting is that we can use whatever tools we want, however we want. I do though think it’s good practice to be aware of what alternatives are out there should our needs change, or should our tools change to no longer align with our needs.
All containers do that. Its nothing new just another implementation of the idea with its own idea about what is best. It only saves resources in the form of time if its a large scale operation and finally its just the last in a long line of similar solutions.