I'm getting into the world of containers finally. It's been something that I put off for years, thinking that it was a waste and wouldn't really go anywhere, but I was wrong.

For this work, I've been using Podman. It's a RedHat fork/replacement for Docker, and is open source. What's cool about it is that you can use Docker images, Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml syntax, and have all of the features that Docker would have in your environment.

What has really put this in high gear for me is that I need to move a lot of my content off of the server that this blog is on, including the blog itself, and host it elsewhere. The cheapest option is to run it all from a small server here at home, then use services like Cloudflare to route the traffic to it and serve it back to the users as if it was on another server. I also like that they have CDN caching for static assets, which will really help with bandwidth over time.

The setup I have been working on for FlightMan uses 3 containers:

• The PHP/Apache bits
• The MySQL/MariaDB
• The MongoDB

It's worked well so far, and I think it can really help me to keep things isolated and secure much easier than a single server trying to serve all the content directly.

All in all, I feel good about this, and I think it's going to add a lot of skills to my toolbelt and CV.