Yes it’s ok, in general. It’s not the most modern or efficient way of managing infrastructure but it’s worked for decades now. It all depends on what you’re hosting, for who, and for how many people.

If you’re hosting internal company infrastructure for a relatively static number of users in a single of set few regions to deliver to, bare metal monolithic stuff is absolutely fine. It’s when you’re an app or service company and your infrastructure is for the back end for a public service that needs to be able to scale dynamically, and you’re worried about high 24/7 uptime, and latency to end users is a global issue that things like microservice architecture, containerization, and iac starts becoming important.

The whole containerization crazy is important for microservices architecture where you split your app into different pieces. This lets you scale different parts of you app as needed, it prevents your entire app from failing just because one part of it failed, it allows for lifecycle management like blue/green deployments with no downtime, allows developers to work on different parts of the app and update at a faster cadence than one big release for the entire thing every time you update one small part of it, things like that.

Don't quote me, but as far as I know containers can't fix the issue if the host kernel is too old.

For example the issue of MySQL 5 being unavailable would be a non-issue with a container

So people careless enough to "just container it" for old, possibly security-compromised software - you call that a "non-issue"? How about upgrading and configuring for compatibility?

you can just set up containers on your bare metal server. in fact if you're going to install insecure services you definitely want to containerize them, though tbh you need to run really far away from whatever it is you're doing that requires sql5, or at least don't let it be reachable on the internet, that should be network-isolated, which really limits its utility.

One thing is that I don't know for sure if it is containerized or not. The topic was migration, and that facet would be not relevant to the core. When I'm doing a write up of things like this, I tend to omit details like that unless it is core to the subject at hand. Including replacing a funky ingress situation with a more universally recognizable nginx example. The users of a container setup would understand how to translate to their scenario.

For another, I'll say that I've probably seen more people getting screwed up because they didn't understand how to use containers and used them anyway. Most notably they make their networking needlessly convoluted and can't understand it. Also when they kind of mindlessly divide a flow for "microservices", they get lost in the debug.

They are useful, but I think people might do a lot better if they:

• More carefully considered how they split things up
• Go ahead and use host networking, it's pretty good
• unix domain sockets can be your friend instead of binding to tcp for everything. I much favor reverse proxy to unix domain instead of handling IP/ports, which is what the container networks buy most people but the flow is too gnarly
• Be wary of random dockerhub "appliances", they tend to be poorly maintained.

If you are writing in rust or golang, containers might not really buy you much other than a headache, so long as you distinct users for security isolation. For something like python, it might be a more thorough approach that virtalenv, though I wouldn't like to keep a python stack maintained with how fickle the ecosysyem is. Node is pretty much always "virtualenv" like, but even worse for fickle dependencies.

Baremetal is definitively making a comeback. But you should have some way of orchestrating the deployment as code regardless.

Wha?

You do realize there are plenty of bare metal infrastructure deployments out in the world, yeah? Being in a container solves no problems in this scenario at all.