How Much Should Live Together? Learning to Isolate Services the Hard Way

Also Published On trever.cloud Medium LinkedIn Most of us who get into self-hosting start the same way: start with linux, throw a few apps into Docker, get them running and connectable outside the home network, and call it good for months, maybe even years. Nothing wrong with that approach. A compose file and a spare mini PC gets you further than you think, and if it works and you don't have to think about it, that's a perfectly fine place to stop. Then there's the rest of us. The people who get that first setup running, feel the little spark of "wait, I built this", and immediately start wondering what else is possible. More services. Less babysitting. A real answer to "what happens if this box dies at 2am". If any of that sounds familiar, this one's for you. If you keep going, you'll eventually run into the question every self-hosted setup faces sooner or later, whether you notice it happening or not, "how much should live together, and how much should be kept apart?". Put everything on one box and you quickly feel the fragility when one bad update takes everything down with it. Or when nightly backups put services on hold longer and longer. Split everything into its own isolated piece and you've gained resiliency but now manage a lot of moving parts. Most of the actual learning in running infrastructure happens in the space between those two answers. Where you draw that line is where most of the real infrastructure lessons live. Over the years, I've lived through a few different answers to that question in my own homelab, and each one taught me something the previous one couldn't. It started with a large VM, Docker installed, and every service I wanted to self-host running as a container inside. It was the fastest path to "it's actually working", and at the time that was the whole goal. I didn't know yet what I'd eventually want out of this thing, so keeping the infrastructure simple while I figured that out made sense. That setup carried me a long way, and I don