How to deploy Pi-Hole with Docker and stop ads on every device on your LAN

Pi-Hole's containerization exemplifies a critical shift in how we approach infrastructure concerns at the data platform layer. While ad-blocking seems tangential to data engineering, the underlying pattern—using Docker to deploy lightweight, network-level services that operate transparently across heterogeneous clients—mirrors how we're rethinking observability, governance, and security infrastructure. I've seen teams adopt similar DNS-level approaches for data lineage tracking and PII masking, where a single containerized service provides organization-wide functionality without requiring client-side adoption. The operational elegance here matters: instead of managing extensions or agent installations across dozens of machines, you deploy once and gain universal coverage. For data platforms, this translates to infrastructure-as-code patterns for cross-cutting concerns like metadata enrichment or quality gates. The recommendation? Audit your data stack for opportunities to shift enforcement from application-level to network or service-level abstractions. Where are you still pushing logic to individual tools when a centralized, containerized service could handle it more reliably?