haroldgsm
Member
Grumpy Old Sysadmin
- Joined:
- May 2024
- Posts:
- 329
- From:
- Ohio, US
Back when we managed servers, there was no Portainer, no Yacht, no fancy web UI. Kids these days want a point-and-click interface for everything.
I've been in this business for 20 years. Mark my words: every megabyte you spend on a GUI is a megabyte stolen from your actual workloads. On a 1GB host, that 80MB for Portainer represents 8% of your total memory.
Back when we had 256MB servers, we didn't waste resources on dashboards. You learned the CLI or you found another profession. These lightweight UIs are still bloat compared to SSH and a terminal.
The third option you dismiss—pure CLI—is the only sensible choice for truly constrained environments. Yacht will abandon development within two years, mark my words. Portainer will add more features, more weight. The command line remains.
IPv4, IRC, and irssi — fight me
kenji3
Member
- Joined:
- Jul 2024
- Posts:
- 138
- From:
- Osaka, JP
I think the choice depends on your use case and frequency of changes.
For my personal servers in Asia-Pacific locations, I use Portainer on a 2GB HostHatch instance: https://hosthatch.com. It is stable. However, on my 1GB test box, I use CLI only.
Yacht has an interesting template system. I tried it briefly. It felt faster than Portainer, but I worried about long-term support. The project seems small.
If you deploy containers daily, a UI saves time. If you set and forget, CLI is sufficient. I do not think there is one correct answer for everyone.
conbini > datacenter snacks