Observed Signal · Mar 25, 2026 · Technical Article · Source: DEV Community · Impact: 1/5 · Sentiment: Positive
Steward Containers: Lessons from Container Misuse
A developer recounts lessons from trying to run an entire VM environment inside a single privileged container. The original approach—treating the host OS as irrelevant—failed when Oracle Linux's SELinux enforcement blocked the privileged container, so the author switched to Ubuntu 24.04 Minimal. The correct pattern discovered is a lightweight "steward" container (Alpine + Podman + podman‑compose) that sequences purpose-built upstream images (rancher/k3s, tailscale/tailscale) rather than extending scratch images. The author accepted trade-offs (abandoning Longhorn due to iSCSI/kernel-module requirements) and achieved a reproducible, ephemeral bootstrap: from VM creation to ArgoCD deployment in ~2m30s, with state kept on block volumes and preserve_boot_volume=false in Terraform.
Technical developer best-practices about container orchestration and ephemeral infrastructure; useful for engineers but not industry-shifting for AdTech/MarTech.
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Key Takeaways & Evidence Grounding
- Attempting to run an entire environment in a single privileged container conflicted with SELinux on Oracle Linux.
- Author switched host OS to Ubuntu 24.04 Minimal to avoid SELinux enforcement issues for the privileged container.
- Adopted a 'steward' container pattern: a thin Alpine image running Podman and podman-compose to orchestrate upstream images.
- Uses upstream images rancher/k3s:v1.35.2-k3s1 and tailscale/tailscale:v1.94.2 rather than modifying scratch images.
- Longhorn was not adopted due to its iSCSI/kernel-module requirements; the author stores state on block volumes and set preserve_boot_volume=false in Terraform.
- The 'Ephemerality Project' bootstrapped ArgoCD and deployed the root app in approximately 2 minutes 30 seconds after VM creation.
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