[ Removed by moderator ]

I've been working on a project that needs to interact with MT5 accounts, and the one thing that keeps bothering me is how much infrastructure ends up existing just to keep a trading terminal alive. The application itself runs happily on Linux. The database, APIs, monitoring, containers everything is straightforward. Then suddenly there's a Windows VM sitting in the middle because one piece of the stack depends on it. I started looking into alternatives that expose MT5 through an API instead of requiring every application to talk to a local terminal directly. It seems like the idea is to keep the rest of your services independent while the MT5-specific part is handled separately.

Did it actually reduce the operational headache? Did you still end up maintaining Windows instances anyway? If you had to build the same stack again today, would you still self-host everything, or would you isolate that dependency behind an API layer?

I'm mostly interested in the infrastructure side of this rather than trading itself, how other people have balanced self-hosting with the reality that some software just wasn't designed for a Linux-first environment.