Containers are very lightweight. I have no desire to build anything so I always just add another service container to my existing stacks.

Yeah is type 1. But it pools supports network storage and is free, and I know how to use it.

I run HA as a container in a vm. I back HA data up nightly and the compose script for running HA is archived on github. If the vm dies there is another vm that can bring it back up. If the host dies (I have a pool of xenserver (xcp-ng) hosts, so it would be a major domestic disaster if they all croaked) I have a fallback to run HA on docker on wsl. If the house burns down all the scripts are on GitHub and the backups get sent to Azure monthly. I think I’m covered.

Add in alertmanager and hook it to slack. Get notified whenever containers or systems are misbehaving.

Gitlab at least used to be the open source release of GitHub. I ran it in my lab for a while but stopped as I was using github anyway. It was easy to setup and maintain but it used a lot of resources. I ran it on a vm, there is likely a docker build as well.

My only serious complaint with docker is the quality of their updates. They keep breaking stuff. If podman supported all docker functionality including compose based stacks, I’d consider switching, but last time I looked it didn’t.

Windows requires smb v2 or later. Smb 1 is hopelessly insecure.

The integration of Docker for windows with wsl2 is an abomination that breaks just about every time I update either ddw or windows. Also the fact that it is tied to my user account ( both ddw and wsl2) means that it is not a great choice for persistent services. I still use it to provide monitoring agents for Prometheus and portainer, but otherwise everything runs on Linux vms on my homelab xenserver cluster.

It is possible to install docker without ddw. It’s documented for server versions of windows, but is basically only for running windows containers. The only use case for that is windows build agents as far as I can tell.

Docker can be installed standalone on wsl2 and would be more reliable.