I’m reusing a blade server I managed to snag from a company I worked for in 2008. It’s perfect as a media server for friends and family. It is only recently degrading slightly but hey, it lasted a long time!

Point is you can use almost anything. Do your homework on compatible parts and make what you can afford

Your favorite album

I don’t disagree with there being tradeoffs in terms of speed, like function vs network requests. But eventually your whole monolith gets so fuckin damn big that everything else slows down.

The whole stack sits in a huge expensive VM, attached to maybe 3 or 4 large database instances, and dev changes take forever to merge in or back out.

Every time a dev wants to locally test their build, they type a command and have to wait for 15-30 minutes. Then troubleshoot any conflicts. Then run over 1000 unit tests. Then check that they didn’t break coverage requirements. Then make a PR. Which triggers the whole damn process all over again except it has to redownload the docker images, reinstall dependencies, rerun 1000+ unit tests, run 1000+ integration tests, rebuild the frontend, which has to happen before running end to end UI tests, pray nothing breaks, merge to main, do it ALL OVER AGAIN FOR THE STAGING ENVIRONMENT, QA has to plan for and execute hundreds of manual tests, and we’re not even at prod yet. The whole way begging for approvals from whoever gets impacted by anything from a one line code change to thousands.

When this process gets so large that any change takes hours to days, no matter how small the change is, then you’re fucked. Because unfucking this once it gets too big becomes such a monstrous effort that it’s equivalent to rebuilding the whole thing from scratch.

I’ve done this song and dance so many times. If you want your shit to be speedy on request, great, just expect literally everything else to drag down. When companies were still releasing software like once a quarter this made sense. It doesn’t anymore.

I’d say for myself it’s a tit for tat situation.

If the company I hypothetically pirate from is a total prick, mistreats their employees, donates a part of the money they earned from my purchase to lobby to my government to reduce the rights of minorities, I won’t give a single fuck. I may even just never touch their product out of spite.

Are they inoffensive and fairly neutral? I likely won’t pirate if I have the means to buy it.

Are they basically ConcernedApe? I will follow them to the ends of the earth showering them with praise and riches. Never pirate and would actively shame those who do

I approve of this expanded answer. I may have been too ELI5 in my post.

If the OP has read this far, I’m not telling you to use docker, but you could consider it if you want to store all of your services and their configurations in a backup somewhere on your network so if you have to set up a new raspberry pi for any reason, now it’s a simple sequence of docker commands (or one docker-compose command) to get back up and running. You won’t need to remember how to reinstall all of the dependencies.

It’s virtual machines but faster, more configurable with a considerably larger set of automation, and it consumes less computer resources than a traditional VM. Additionally, in software development it helps solve a problem summarized as “works on my machine.” A lot of traditional server creation and management relied on systems that need to be set up perfectly identical every deployment to prevent dumb defects based on whose machine was used to write it on. With Docker, it’s stupid easy to copy the automated configuration from “my machine” to “your machine.” Now everyone, including the production systems, are running from “my machine.” That’s kind of a big deal, even if it could be done in other ways naturally on Linux operating systems. They don’t have the ease of use or the same shareability.

What you’re doing is perfectly expected. That’s a great way of getting around using Docker. You aren’t forced into using it. It’s just easier for most people

As a trans person, I feel the need to say this for the cis so that y’all don’t need to tiptoe around it or keep quiet:

Trans people are not immune to being awful people. You may not know if someone is really trans or not. But you can tell with much greater certainty whether or not they’re an asshole. So stick to that instead of getting baited into bigoted language.

Asshole is gender neutral. 👏