The Container That Isn't a Container

Mon, 25 May 2026 09:00:00 -0600

Running a growing homelab means making infrastructure decisions you’ll live with for years. As I have been rebuilding my lab over the past few months, Docker was the obvious first choice: container images are easy to stand up, networking ports and dependencies are declared in a compose file, and the ecosystem is enormous. For a handful of services, that model worked cleanly.

As the service count grows, the operational friction accumulates. Backups require protecting data volumes and compose configurations as separate concerns, with different tools for each. Updating a service means a pull-and-redeploy cycle rather than a package update. Migrating a container between hosts runs into subtle differences in network backends, volume paths, and runtime configurations that rarely surface until something actually needs to move.

Infrastructure on David R. Longnecker - Converting Coffee to Code

The Container That Isn't a Container