Curious to know what the experiences are for those who are sticking to bare metal. Would like to better understand what keeps such admins from migrating to containers, Docker, Podman, Virtual Machines, etc. What keeps you on bare metal in 2025?

  • renegadespork@lemmy.jelliefrontier.netEnglish
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    2 months ago

    Do you host on more than one machine? Containerization / virtualization begins to shine most brightly when you need to scale / migrate across multiple servers. If you’re only running one server, I definitely see how bare metal is more straight-forward.

    • Lucy :3@feddit.orgEnglish
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      2 months ago

      One main server, with backup servers being very easy to get up and running, either by full-restoring the backup, or installing and restoring specific services. As everything’s backed up to a Hetzner Storage Box, I can always restore it (if I have my USB sticks with the keyfiles).

      I don’t really see the need for multiple running hosts, apart from:

      • Router
      • Workstation which has a 1070 in it, if I need a GPU for something. My 1U server only has space for a low profile and one slot GPU/HPC processor, and one of those would cost way more than its value over my old 1070 would be.
    • zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
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      2 months ago

      This is a big part of why I don’t use VMs or containers at home. All of those abstractions only start showing their worth once you scale them out.

      • renegadespork@lemmy.jelliefrontier.netEnglish
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        2 months ago

        Hm, I don’t know about that either. While scale is their primary purpose, another core tenant of containerization is reproducibility. For example

        1. If you are developing any sort of software, containers are a great way to ensure that the environment of your builds remains consistent.
        2. If you are frequently rebuilding a server/application for any reason, containers provide a good way to ensure everything is configured exactly as it was before, and when used with Git, changes are easy to track. There are also other tools that excel at this (like Ansible).