[crdrost]

Qq, do people doing their own server setup like this use containerization at all?

When I looked at it, it was like “yeah you can run Docker or k3s,” and I think Hashicorp had their own version, but it seemed like folks didn't really bother? Also like setting up virtual networks among VPSes seemed like it required advanced wizardry.

[lolinder]

I have an old desktop with Debian where I run a bunch of random things (Home Assistant, Pihole, Seafile, Jellyfin, ...) and I run everything with Podman Compose.

I have enough things that I'm 100% confident I'd have run into dependency issues by now without containerization, but with Docker files it's trivial to keep them separate. As a bonus, compose.yml files are basically the lingua franca for describing deployments these days, so you can almost always find an example in the official docs for any given service you might want to host and get lots of help.

[ozr]

> do people doing their own server setup like this use containerization at all?

Depends on what you're deploying, really.

If it's one Go service per host, there's no real need. Just a unit file and the binary. Your deployment scheme is scp and a restart.

For more complicated setups, I've used docker compose.

> Also like setting up virtual networks among VPSes seemed like it required advanced wizardry.

Another 'it depends'.

If you're running a small SaaS application, you probably don't need multiple servers in the first place.

If you want some for redundancy, most providers offer a 'private network', where bandwidth is unmetered. Each compute provider is slightly different: you'll want to review their docs to see how to do it correctly.

Tailscale is another option for networking, which is super easy to setup.

[cassianoleal]

There’s rarely, if ever, a _need_ for containerisation. Even for a single static binary though, there are benefits like network and filesystem segregation, resource allocation, …

[ranger207]

Depends. Right now I mostly run 1 VM per app stack (eg web server & DB on the same VM) if it supports it, or if it's a single container I have a VM for all of those, or if it's a Docker Compose stack it'll get its own VM. So I'm mostly just using containers as a packaging solution. But I want to learn more about k8s so one of these days I'm going to move everything over to containers (that'll come when I refresh my hardware)

[dsissitka]

I do. Every app I use is run by a dedicated user in a rootless container.

But I'm also one of those weirdos that does all of their development in a VM. I might be a tiny bit paranoid.

> Also like setting up virtual networks among VPSes seemed like it required advanced wizardry.

Did you try Nebula? Once you get the hang of it it's pretty simple.