home-ops VS nerdctl

These are great operational wins. Agreed very much that having autonomic (can fix itself) systems at your back is a massive game changer. De-crustifies the act of running things.

The other win is that there's a substantial cultural base to this way to go. Folks have been doing selfhosting for ages, but everyone has their own boutique setup some their way. A couple tools and techniques could be shared, but mostly everyone took blank slate configs & built their own system up, & added their own monitoring & operational scripts.

https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops is a set of helm scripts and other tools that is widely widely used, and there's a lot more like it. It's a huge build out, using convention and a common platform to enable portable knowledge & sharing.

Self hosting did not have intellectual scale out at it's back, before Kubernetes came along. Docker and ansible and others have been around, but theres never been remotely the success there has been today in empowering users to setup & run complex services.

We really have clawed out of the server-hugging jungle &started building some villages. It's wonderful to see.

Going thru this repo https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops

Take a look at my open source GitOps repo managed by Flux here: https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops

Im fully onboard with the geneneral idea as a target.

Right now it's for early early adopters. Hosting stuff is still a painm But we are getting better at hosting stuff, finding stable patterns, paving the path. Hint, it's not doing less, it's not simpler options: it's adopting & making our own industrial scale tooling. https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops is a great early & still strong demonstration; the up front cost od learning is high, but there's the biggest ecosystem of support you can imagine, and once you recognize the patterns, you can get into flow states, make stuff happen, with extreme leverage far beyond where humanity has ever been. Building the empowered individual is happening, and we're using stable good patterns that will mean the individual isnt so off on their own doing ops- they'll have a lot more accrued human experiene at their back, their running of services isnt as simple to understand from the start but goes much much further, is much more mature & well supported in the long run.

My Kubernetes cluster, deployments, infrastructure provisioning is all available over here on Github.

For example: https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops/pull/4528

I'm running minio in my cluster with NFS backend just fine. You can see my deployment of it here.

Direct use of containerd? containerd? turns out I didn't know anything about container technology. containerd was originally developed by Docker in 2015 as a daemon that provided basic container management capabilities under Docker. containerd's scope has gradually expanded and now seems to cover almost everything in the Docker Engine. For example, nerdctl is a CLI for containerd; the UX is almost identical to the Docker CLI, and Docker Compose is also supported (nerdctl compose).

Nerdctl[1] (for containerd) works fine with docker-compose.yml for my purposes (which are not much). The only issue I encountered was with environment variable substitution not working the same as docker-compose, but I didn't look hard for a solution and edited my compose file

1. https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl mine came bundled with Rancher desktop, and 'nerdctl compose up' is all I've needed

I haven't tried it personally but you might be able to export the tar from docker host with docker cli and then load it on containerd host using nerdctl - https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl

It looks like the real nice thing here is having a formula for QEMU with the ARM patch applied: https://github.com/simnalamburt/qemu/tree/hvf

With this I believe you could also used [nerd](https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl) instead of podman but I haven't tested it yet.

One area, where containerd didn't had a first class support was CLI. the default containerd CLI "ctr" has a very naive implementation. The reason for that I believe is, containerd as a system was never meant to be consumed by humans, and was designed to be consumed by higher layers e.g. orchestration systems like nomad or k8s. However, with the deprecation of dockershim in k8s, and users moving to containerd, a new docker compatible CLI came out:

https://github.com/AkihiroSuda/nerdctl

If you just have containerd running on your system (with no docker daemon running), you can just install nerdctl and add

alias docker="nerdctl"

to your ~/.bashrc file.

Then you can just run any docker commands the way you used to with docker, and it will run those commands against the containerd API giving you the same CLI experience that you used to have with docker.