I recently moved Nextcloud and Gitea from Containers on a Debian VM to Alpine LXCs running Alpine’s packages. I’ve never had Nextcloud’s web interface so snappy and my resource usage for both is next to 0. If you’re running Proxmox I’d highly recommend trying out Alpine LXCs if they package your services.
I've found the idea of LXC containers to be better than they are in practice. I've migrated all of my servers to Proxmox and have been trying to move various services from VMs to LXC containers and it's been such a hassle. You should be able to directly forward disk block devices, but just could not get them to mount for an MinIO array - ended up just setting their entire contents to 100000:100000 and mounting them on the host and forwarding the mount point instead. Never managed to CAP_IPC_LOCK to work correctly for a HashiCorp Vault install. Docker in LXC has some serious pain points and feels very fragile.
It's damning that every time I have a problem with LXC the first search result will be a Proxmox forum topic with a Proxmox employee replying to the effect of "we recommend VMs over LXC for this use case" - Proxmox doesn't seem to recommend LXC for anything. Proxmox + LXC is definitely better than CentOS + Podman, but my heart longs for the sheer competence of FreeBSD Jails.
I’ve had relatively good luck with docker in containers but eventually decided to run docker in VMs as I only semi trust most docker apps and like the added security I get from having it in a full VM in full isolation. Some of the workarounds for docker in LXCs are far from security best practices.
As pointed out, the DNS issue was fixed, and the other point made about Python wheels has also been addressed; quite a good chunk of packages on PyPi have had a musl wheel added in the past 6 months or so, including numpy & scipy. I'm also not certain if the Go part is true; probably somewhere around half of the Go apps I'm running as a container are running or were built on an Alpine base.
Thanks, that’s awesome news to see! I’m currently in the process of tearing out pieces from a monolithic docker stack into more lightweight (and independent) CTs, and have been apprehensive about moving NextCloud.
I’ve played with both Alpine and Debian in LXC, launched multiple services in both at the same time, and, honestly, did not notice any advantages in RAM or CPU consumption. Debian LXC uses slightly more disk, but this is trivial for me
I used to use Alpine containers but I’ve since standardize on Debian completely. Proxmox is Debian, my VMs run Debian, my LXCs run Debian, my VPSs run Debian, Raspian on my RPi is Debian, Armbian on my Odroid is Debian, etc, etc.
The benefit of running the same distribution on all my servers no matter where or how they’re hosted can’t be overstated.
Less mental overhead remembering different commands or config paths, same software on everything, etc. It’s been fantastic and Debian has always been rock solid for me.
Alpine packages services like Gitea and Nextcloud which Debian does not. This makes keeping up to date alot simpler for myself but that’s personal preference.
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