this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2026
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How many containers are you all running? (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 months ago by slazer2au@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

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 spend 0 minutes managing the homelab.

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Why VMs instead of contsiners? Seems like way more processing overhead.

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 3 points 4 months ago

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

[–] torgeir@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Is this in a repo somewhere we can have a look?

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 1 points 4 months ago

I'll DM you... Not sire I want to link those two accounts publicly 😄

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

On an average day, I spend 0 minutes managing the homelab.

0 is the goal. Well done !

Edit: Ha! Some masochist down-voted that.