That's very true. I run quite a few services on my local network for my family (wireguard, nextcloud, homeassistant, frigate, pihole, jellyfin, bitwarden, ...).
While I enjoy setting up and playing with these service, I need to think about managing all these services as little as possible as I don't want to spend all my free time being a system admin.
Also, often a new release is not just a system admin task. Sure, it may not be _that_ hard to do a full backup, pull new docker images, spin them up and verify everything. The time sink comes from keeping track of all the releases of all the different projects, reading up about changes, how the upgrade process works, and so on.
On top of that, my family has become reliant on several of these services, especially nextcloud and bitwarden. The last thing they want are major changes to it. Long term stability with minimal changes can be a feature!
I am exactly in the same situation as you (I did not know frigate, but I do not have cameras either - otherwise you listed my main systems).
I managed to reduce administration to a minimum by using watchtower to automatically upgrade my containers and using mostly the :latest label.
This bit me only twice in a few years:
- with the 19-20 migration of Nextcloud, I had one big blank screen when logging in but the synchronization was working. Turns out it was a new default app (something about dashboarding) that was causing it. Googling an fixing took an hour.
- with one upgrade of Home Assistant where my devices were not available anymore, there was a problem with the upgrade which they fixed quickly but I have already upgraded. Reading the docs/forum and fixing took an hour.
I can live with these two hours across two or three years.
I backup /etc on my server with Borg and I know that, worst case, I will recover. I tested this DRP two weeks ago bare metal (recovering to an empty VM from scratch, that is an ubuntu ISO and ultimately getting my encrypted backups from a friend's system -> it really helped to highlight what I was missing)
I'm currently testing a new appliance setup with Nextcloud which includes the ability to use containers as a default for everything, if your container can be moved to an empty VM, nothing gets deleted as I didn't touch it. I would be really happy if this helped.
Could you please elaborate a bit on the appliance?
I use a home-grade PC with Ubuntu LTS on which there is nothing except for:
- docker
- borg (backup program)
- wireguard (VPN)
- sshd
I then copy /etc/docker from backup, mount some external disks with the data (either backed up or not for things I do not care about), reboot and I am done.
My recovery lasted one hour from starting the download of the ISO to being back on line.
While I enjoy setting up and playing with these service, I need to think about managing all these services as little as possible as I don't want to spend all my free time being a system admin.
Also, often a new release is not just a system admin task. Sure, it may not be _that_ hard to do a full backup, pull new docker images, spin them up and verify everything. The time sink comes from keeping track of all the releases of all the different projects, reading up about changes, how the upgrade process works, and so on.
On top of that, my family has become reliant on several of these services, especially nextcloud and bitwarden. The last thing they want are major changes to it. Long term stability with minimal changes can be a feature!