Was really interested how can I setup pihole in container on my RB5009, watched videos, then repeated according to https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/display/ROS/Container , added all my ADList rules with 786000 domains (I used pihole on my NAS for few years).
What can I say:
-- very poor usability
-- bad performance: 50% of RAM used and it is only one pihole container
-- macvlan?!
-- portainer?
-- wanted to add Unbound (I use it as DNS in pihole setup) - didn`t figure out how to do that on mikrotik ...
-- yaml doesn`t supported
-- docker ps - bad command
When I use pihole on separate server I can easily switch between DNS when my NAS is powered off, it helps me don`t loose connection, just simple - add script to Netwatch what will ping my pihole address and if pihole unreachable - /ip dns set servers=8.8.8.8 and vise-versa.
With this "mikrotik" solution when you use pihole inside routerOS you can not execute the same script, scenario: after some update docker will not start and you will be without internet, because you have DNS=172.17.0.2 (from example in docs), you can not ping 172.17.0.2 - it`s always have ping even when container is powered off and from routerOS terminal always will return successfull ping to 8.8.8.8 even if you don`t have internet on all your clients. So, this is huge minus, to such implementation of docker inside routerOS.
If I`m not mistaken RB5009 - flagship and it can handle only one simple container and even this will take 50% of RAM... what will be if I decided to use one or two more containers?!
When you added wireguard I was happy, when you added containers - I asked "why", why someone needs this on router, I still have no idea.
Also don`t understand one more thing - if you decided to add support of virtualization standard to your routerOS why you can`t provide approved and standard tool (yaml, stack, macvlan, logs, comfortable works with file system and container data itself), why each update to routerOS looks like broken bicycle, only youtube video from mikrotik channel really helpful, without these videos is really complicated to understand what you guys decided to turn inside out and add some "mikrotik" features when even if you know technology - you can not work with this due to weird mikrotik logic, syntaxis so on.
I think in mikrotik on brainstorm session someone told "let`s add container to routerOS, I know how to do that, just few weeks and deploy to production" and some boss stopped this guy with next words: "Hold on, if we add it as people got used to work with it will easy, let`s add complicated syntaxis, 10 places where user have to setup everything, 20 commands for terminal and short instruction and then will "improve" it for years".
After such experiment with your top level router I just wanna buy simple hap ac2 or something similar and forget about these beautiful numbers what everyone show - Ethernet test results (from item description), because they show nothing related to real performance, it`s router guys, don`t try to transform it to computer, nobody will learn your syntaxis to execute simple script.
So, does someone use container? How do you use it? What is your experience? How many free resources you have on router when you decided to use containers?