[lolinder]

I self-host a dozen or so different web apps locally on an old PC, and containers are what makes that feasible to do in my very limited spare time.

If I tried to run all of these directly on the hardware with whatever minimal non-Docker setup each uses, I'd have a dozen update processes, a dozen different ways to start the server, and a dozen log files following a dozen different conventions for storage. I'd also have to be sure that each app I add either uses a different database and language runtime than the ones I've installed already or is compatible with the versions of those that I already installed.

Instead, with Docker/Podman, I can use the same tool (compose files stored in a git repo) to manage all of the apps and their dependencies with zero risk of weird dependency issues across app boundaries.