[Balladeer]

How long did it take you to go from "making a new server / copying configs is fine" to "this is tedious enough I'd like to abstract it?"

Like, was it a years-long journey or is this the type of thing that becomes immediately obvious once you start working w/ N servers or something?

I'm trying to learn the space between "physical machines in my apartment" and "cloud-native everything" and that's led me to the point where I'm happily using cloud-init to configure servers and running fun little docker compose systems on them.

[duckmysick]

For homelab (but not only) you can install Proxmox Virtual Environment on your physical machine. You end up with a way to create VMs and containers with a web UI. It supports cloud-init too. If you have a spare machine it's excellent for experimenting and learning.

https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-virtual-environment/overv...

https://proxmox-helper-scripts.vercel.app/

[dewey]

I wanted to self-host more of my Rails projects and Dokku comes with nice Buildpack support so I can just push a generic Rails app and it'll run out of the box. That plus that I had to set up a new server after many years made me look into that more.

[abra0]

That's where I am too right now for personal projects, and I ended up reimplementing parts of Dokuploy for that, but I don't feel much of a need to move from "fun little docker compose" for some reason

[imtringued]

cloud-init is good, but it assumes that you treat your VMs like containers and that means you will need a lot more VMs that you constantly create and destroy and you will have to deal with block storage for persistence.

If all you do is ssh into a system with docker compose installed, you will hardly benefit from cloud-init beyond the first boot.