How do you keep up?

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This is not practical for a home setup. Not because it would be expensive for more hardware or whatever, but because as soon as you have multiple systems doing the same thing, their state diverges and for pretty much anything that is popular for selfhosting you cannot merge them again or mirgrate users between them without loosing anything. Distributed databases alone are a huge pita, and maintaining such redundant setups would be a million times more effort than just making sure that you can easily and quickly atomically roll back failed updates

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As I said "how to reproduce this in a home setup".

I'm running multiple machines, paid little for all of them, and they all run at pretty low power. I replicate stuff on a schedule, I and have a cloud backup I verify quarterly.

If OP is thinking about how to ensure uptime (however they define it) and prevent downtime due to upgrades, then looking at how Enterprise does things (the people who use research into this very subject performed by universities and organizations like Microsoft and Google), would be useful.

Nowhere did I tell OP to do things this way, and I'd thank you to not make strawmen of my words.

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I don't update unless I'm bored

Hahahaha, one of my kind!

My upgrades usually occur because I'm setting up a new system anyway, that way my effort is building for tomorrow in addition to the upgrades, and I get testing time to ensure changeover is pretty smooth.

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Wow, neat approach.

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Just subscribe to the release channel. That varies from OS to OS or Software, but is worth it.

Use tools that are universal. For example, I have not used TrueNAS Scale because they did not support native docker at the time. OS specific solutions are more likely to break then universal once (truecharts vs docker)

To get up and running again after a complete failure i can just download the latest config and data from my backup and set up any distro that supports docker and my system is running again.

I do OS upgrades when they are available, usually within 1 or 2 days and containers are updated with watchtower daily.

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I use NixOS so if an update breaks, I just roll back. And since it's effectively a rolling release distribution there isn't any risk of being left behind on an outdated version.

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Constant maintenance? What's that?

Here's my setup:

OS - openSUSE Leap - I upgrade when I remember
software - Docker images in a docker compose file; upgrading is a simple docker command, and I'll only do it if I need something in the update
hardware - old desktop; I'll upgrade when I have extra hardware

I honestly don't think about it. I run updates when I get to it (every month or so), and I'll do an OS upgrade a little while after a new release is available (every couple years?).

I don't even know what TrueCharts is. Maybe that's your issue?

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Same, but openSUSE. Tumbleweed on my desktop and laptop, Leap on my servers.

And yeah, if I need to babysit something, I'll use an alternative. I'll upgrade when I'm ready to, which is usually over holidays when I'm bored and looking for a project.

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How does that help here?

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For automating maintenance and updates? How exactly does it not?

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They are complaining because of the number of updates and breaking changes. Ansible just a tool for bulk changes

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Yeah, everything that's already been said, except that I specifically chose an off-the-shelf Synology NAS with Docker support to run my core setup for this exact reason. It needs a reboot maybe once or twice a year for critical updates but is otherwise rock solid.

I have since added a small N100 box for things that need a little extra grunt (Plex mainly) but I run Ubuntu Server LTS with Docker on that and do maintenance on it about as often as I reboot the NAS.

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Debian, baby.

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You can choose a slower train for scale. Go for the stable release or even the enterprise release. Update once in a few months or so.

I went with Talos OS for my apps after the mess from IX-systems and for the most part it has been set and forget.

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Docker: More or less automatically upgraded (compose)
Proxmox/TrueNas: My setup breaks so often I want to do something that I will check it every once in a while and run updates
Main Debian NAS: Automatic updates. (apt)
Raspberry Pi: Automatic Updates (apt)
Windows: If it prompts me and I am shutting it down amyway: Fine. Thanks for notifying.

I stopped chassing updates quite some time ago.

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Release: stable

Keep the updates as hands off as possible. Docker compose, TTecks lxc updater.

I come through once a week or so to update the stacks, I come through once a month or so to update the machines. Total time updating is 3hrs a month, I could drop that a lot when I get around to writing some scripts to update docker images.

Minimise attack surface and outsource security. I have nothing at all open to the internet, I use Tailscale to create tunnels. I'm trusting my security to Tailscale but they are much, much, better at it than I am.

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Release: stable

Keep the updates as hands off as possible. Docker compose, TTeck's LXC updater, automatic upgrades.

I come through once a week or so to update the stacks (dockge > stack > update), I come through once a month or so to update the machines (I have 5 total). Total time updating is 3hrs a month. I could drop that time a lot when I get around to writing some scripts to update docker images, then I'd just have to "apt update && apt upgrade"

Minimise attack surface and outsource security. I have nothing at all open to the internet, I use Tailscale to create tunnels. I'm trusting my security to Tailscale, Pihole and my ISP's firewall, but they are much, much better at it than I am.

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Same here. I spent last month transitioning all my servers to NixOS and it feels so comfy! I do a small test on my desktop when I do something that might break stuff first, and then add it to server's config later.

--target-host and --use-remote-sudo makes it even better too.

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I run a Fedora server.

All of my apps are in docker containers set to restart unless stopped by me.

Then I run a cron job that is scheduled at like 3 or 4am that runs docker pull on all containers and restarts them. Then it runs all system uldtwa and restarts the server.

Every week or so I just spot check to make sure it is still working. This has been my process for like 6 months without issue.

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How do you keep up?