I have been trying to think of a way to solve this problem for a while. I would like to support Nabu Casa by buying the Green or Yellow, but neither are powerful enough to run all of the containers I would like to host. As a result, I also run several containers on TrueNAS scale and use container proxies (like Frigate’s proxy) to expose them to Home Assistant.
Ideally, I would be able to manage all of the running containers from the “Addon” panel. This would be perfect when installing a system for a friend or family member who does not want to learn multiple systems. Essentially, I am hoping for Home Assistant to act a bit like a beginner’s NAS OS (like yunohost, umbrel, casaos, etc), without requiring Home Assistant to also be a NAS.
I am open to other ways of solving this issue, but am currently thinking it would best be solved by running a docker socket proxy on the NAS and connecting to it from Home Assistant. (We could possibly leverage something like K8S or Swarm instead, to allow multi-host containers) The requested feature is the option to select which docker host to run the addon on (like an affinity setting), thus allowing Home Assistant to manage containers on multiple servers. Essentially, Home Assistant supports remote storage, now let’s support remote containers.
That would allow for an iFrame of the UI in Home Assistant, but would lose all of the AddOn functionality. The benefit would be getting acces to the mamagement that Home Assistant provides, the ingress, the local networking, etc. Portainer would work, but one pane would be better.
To clarify, I am thinking specifically of how to set up a system for a non-tech user and provise them “App Store” feeling. I could just put HAOS directly on am x86 server, but I like the idea of supporting Nabu Casa’s hardware.
What if two devices were to have Home Assistant OS running on them. Would it be possible to have HA Core run on one and the addons on the other?
Essentially, the docker commands are proxied from one device to the other. Then you could have a HA Yellow/Green that runs the Core and a secondary device for all your addons. Both would be fully supported by the supervisor.
Think of a user who bough the Home Assistant Green. They have had it for a couple of years and have enough addons and devices that it is now maxed out. Instead of scrapping the device and buying a new, more powerful one, they could buy another green and move some addons over. Only one runs HA Core, both are controlled in the Addons page.