I run most of my homelab services as LXC containers on Proxmox, and lately I’ve been reaching for Alpine Linux because the base image is tiny. The stock alpine-3.23-default template Proxmox ships is great for that reason, but it comes with a catch: it has no SSH server installed. A fresh Alpine container boots with no sshd, so any automation that expects to connect over SSH (in my case Terraform provisioning the container and Ansible configuring it) has nothing to talk to on first boot.

You can fix this by hand every time you create a container, but that gets old fast. A better option is to bake your own template once, with SSH already enabled, and reuse it for every new container. Proxmox makes this straightforward because a container backup (vzdump) can be dropped into the template cache and used as an OS template directly.