Containers

I almost exclusively run anything on my servers using containers, even on my Pi at home, my servers are definitely cattle not pets. The isolation from the host and other apps is great, once you've built the container it just works until you make some changes. They're easy to back up and restore, everything is defined. Add docker compose files on top of this to describe how each container interacts with other containers, and you have yourself a fully reproducible easy to manage set of infrastructure.

These days I almost exclusively use custom written containers too, a little overboard some might say. I did start with other people's images, these all had different conventions, users, base images, some weren't kept up to date, most run as root, etc. In the middle of all this annoying me, docker hub introduced their massive rate limiting and project restrictions. So I decided to move to my own registry and my own images. Keeping these up to date was a bit of a pain, but they were at least all small, rootless (unless required) and based on the same image.

I have tooling to make writing the containers easier and to keep them up to date and things (for the most part) just work. I'm still not fully happy with the setup and am always thinking of improvements, but until something else that gives these benefits comes along I can't see it being a move away from containers.