Will migrating all my services to Docker be worth it?
Docker has long been somewhat of a black box for me. I knew it exists, and I’ve also run services inside Docker containers before. For example, my miniflux server – a little app to fetch RSS-feeds*, of blogs and more – ran inside a Docker container before. Now, I don’t use it inside Docker anymore. It probably broke… But with my apprenticeshit I had the chance to put a few hours into learning Docker. By no means am I a Docker Pro now. I have many shortcomings. This is probably to be expected, though. Atferall I only spent a few hours on a Udemy course. It’s not like I have years of hands-on experience. But I understood the concepts. And that’s a great beginning.
I run my own little VPS, which is also used to run this website**. Alongside that, it also runs a few other services, which namely are:
- I2P router
- Radicale (calendar server)
- miniflux (RSS-reader)
- Telegram bot All these services demand ressources from my server. Sometimes, under load it seems, they demand more than what my server has to offer. This often leads to unexpected reboots. Depending on how things are run, some services imediately go back online and I never even realise through them that something went wrong. With other services – namely those run inside screen-windows*** – I have the problem, that they don’t restart themselves.
This is where Docker comes into play. Now that I have basic knowledge of Docker, I am thinking to dockerize everything. Any service running on my machine should be a Docker container. The theory I have is that with this setup only single services would crash under heavy load, but restart themselves again after a minute or two, while other services and the VPS as a whole would remain “unharmed”.
But this seems to be connected to some work. Yes, it sould be possible. But Claude AI gave me an estimate of half a day to migrate everything to Docker, espacially that Radicale and Miniflux already hold data that I would want to migrate to the Docker containers. And persistent volumes really are a deep topic.
I don’t really know yet, if I will do this entirely, because for some things it also seems a bit unhandy. For example, a webserver for this blog inside a Docker container doesn’t sound too comfortable. But I’m not entirely sure, and maybe I’m wrong. I’ll keep my journey regarding this up to date somewhere on this blog.
- This blog also offers an RSS-Feed, which you can use in your RSS-Reader, such as Thunderbird, Miniflux or a browser add-on.
- Generally speaking, it is not great advice to publish knowledge about your own server infrastructure. That makes you vulnerable to attackers. I hope to change my set up some time within the next months, so this vector of attack would be eliminated as well. Hope with me!
- This is a tool that helps me run multiple applications, that demand to be run with constant output to the console, in somewhat of a similuated environment. Another well-known program that does something similar is tmux.