I’ve never had so much fun self-hosting. A decade or so ago I was hosting things on Linode and running all kinds of servers for myself but with the rise of cloud services, I favored just giving everything to Google. I noticed how popular this community was on Reddit/Lemmy and now it’s my new addiction.
I’m a software engineer and have plenty of experience deploying to AWS/GCP so my head has been buried in the sand with these cloud providers. Now that I’m looking around there are things like NextCloud, Pihole, and Portainer all set up with Cloudflare Zero Trust… I feel like I’m living the dream of having the convenience to deploy my own services with proper authentication and it’s so much fun.
Reviving old hardware to act as local infra is so badass it feels great turning on old machines that were collecting dust. I’m now trying to convince my brother to participate in doing hard-drive swaps on a monthly basis so I have some backup redundancy off-site without needing to back up to the cloud.
Sorry if this feels ranty but I just can’t get over how awesome this is and I feel like a kid again. Cheers to this awesome community!
EDIT: Just also found Fission and OpenFaaS, selfhosted serverless functions, I’m jumping with joy right now!
I think the real benefits of Docker don’t become unquestionably obvious untill you’ve ever tried to manage more than one installation of some kind of server software in the same machine and inevitably learn the hard way that this comes with a lot of problems and downsides.
- From simple things like if the environment needs a restart, you can just restart the container, without rebooting the machine, interrupting other applications.
- To seriously dangerous and problematic things, like configuring your system to work with your new application only to realize that this configuration is breaking your other server software.
So far I’ve avoiding learning about Docker by just buying a new old end-of-life Chromebook when I wanted to run anything. Works pretty well, except for the giant pile of Chromebooks behind my TV.
