There is a post about getting overwhelmed by 15 containers and people not wanting to turn the post into a container measuring contest.
But now I am curious, what are your counts? I would guess those of you running k*s would win out by pod scaling
docker ps | wc -l
For those wanting a quick count.
25, with your “docker ps” command, on my aging Nuc10 PC. Only using 5GB of its 16GB of RAM.
What, me worry?
89 - 79 on my main server and 10 on my sandbox.
61 containers in 26 docker files.
49, I could imagine running all of those bare would be hard with dependencies
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage Plex Brand of media server package k8s Kubernetes container management package
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About 62 deployments with 115 “pods”
I am like Oprah yelling “you get a container, you get a container, Containers!!!” At my executables.
I create aliases using toolbox so I can run most utils easily and securely.
Toolbox?
Podman toolboxes, which layer a do gained over your user file system, allowing you to make toolbox specific changes to the system that only affect that toolbox.
I think it’s oringinally meant for development of desktop environments and OS features, but you can put most command line apps in them without much feauture breakage.
I always saw them pitched by Fedora as the blessed way to run CLI applications on an immutable host.
That’s why I use them, but they are missing the in ramp to getting this working nicely for regular users.
E.g. how do I install neovim with toolbox and get Wayland clipboard working, without doing a bunch of manual work? It’s easy to add to my ostree, but that’s not really the way it should be.
I ended up making a bunch of scripts to manage this, but now I feel like I’m one step away from just using nixos.
I don’t use them. I’m using OpenBSD on my server which don’t support this feature.
No jails?
- There are usually one or two of those that are just experimental and might get trashed.
Zero.
About 35 NixOS VMs though, each running either a single service (e.g. Paperless) or a suite (Sonarr and so on plus NZBGet, VPN,…).
There’s additionally a couple of client VMs. All of those distribute over 3 Proxmox hosts accessing the same iSCSI target for VM storage.
SSL and WireGuard are terminated at a physical firewall box running OpnSense, so with very few exceptions, the VMs do not handle any complicated network setup.
A lot of those VMs have zero state, those that do have backup of just that state automated to the NAS (simply via rsync) and from there everything is backed up again through borg to an external storage box.
In the stateless case, deploying a new VM is a single command; in the stateful case, same command, wait for it to come up, SSH in (keys are part of the VM images), run
restore-<whatever>.On an average day, I spent 0 minutes managing the homelab.
Is this in a repo somewhere we can have a look?
Why VMs instead of contsiners? Seems like way more processing overhead.
Eh… Not really. Qemu does a really good job with VM virtualizarion.
I believe I could easily build containers instead of VMs from the nix config, but I actually do like having a full VM: since it’s running a full OS instead of an app, all the usual nix tooling just works on it.
Also: In my day job, I actually have to deal quite a bit with containers (and kubernetes), and I just… don’t like it.
Yeah, just wondered because containers just hook into the kernal in a way that doesn’t have overhead. Where as a VM has to emulate the entire OS. But hey I get it, fixing stuff inside the container can be a pain
On an average day, I spend 0 minutes managing the homelab.
0 is the goal. Well done !

64 containers in total, 60 running - the remaining 4 are Watchtowers that I run manually whenever I feel like it (and have time to fix things if something should break).
What tool is that screenshot from?
I recently went from 0 to 1. Reinstalled my VPS under debian, and decided to run my forgejo instance with their rootless container. Mostly as a learning experience, but also to easily decouple the forgejo version from whichever version my distro packages.
None, if it’s not in a Debian repo I don’t deploy it on my stable server.
It’s not really about docker itself, I just don’t think software has married enough if it’s not packaged properly
My kubernetes cluster is sitting happily at 240, and technically those are pods some of which have up to 3 or 4 containers, so who knows the full number.
My containers are running containers… At least 24.




