Currently, I run Unraid and have all of my services’ setup there as docker containers. While this is nice and easy to setup initially, it has some major downsides:
- It’s fragile. Unraid is prone to bugs/crashes with docker that take down my containers. It’s also not resilient so when things break I have to log in and fiddle.
- It’s mutable. I can’t use any infrastructure-as-code tools like terraform, and configuration sort of just exist in the UI. I can’t really roll back or recover easily.
- It’s single-node. Everything is tied to my one big server that runs the NAS, but I’d rather have the NAS as a separate fairly low-power appliance and then have a separate machine to handle things like VMs and containers.
So I’m looking ahead and thinking about what the next iteration of my homelab will look like. While I like unraid for the storage stuff, I’m a little tired of wrangling it into a container orchestrator and hypervisor, and I think this year I’ll split that job out to a dedicated machine. I’m comfortable with, and in fact prefer, IaC over fancy UIs and so would love to be able to use terraform or Pulumi or something like that. I would prefer something multi-node, as I want to be able to tie multiple machines together. And I want something that is fault-tolerant, as I host services for friends and family that currently require a lot of manual intervention to fix when they go down.
So the question is: how do you all do this? Kubernetes, docker-compose, Hashicorp Nomad? Do you run k3s, Harvester, or what? I’d love to get an idea of what people are doing and why, so I can get some ideas as to what I might do.
I can’t remember what I was watching, but I remember watching something where they said Kubernetes is designed for something so large in scale that the only reason people have heard about it is because some product manager asked what Google use and then demanded that they use it to replicate the success of Google and subsequently, hobbyists also followed and now a bunch of people are using stuff that’s poorly optimized for such small scale systems.
Haha yeah true, but it does come with the advantage that it’s super prevalent and so has a lot of tools and docs. Nearly every self-hosted service I use has a docs page for how to set it up with Kubernetes. (Although it’s not nearly as prevalent as plain docker)
I would stay away from kubernets/k3/k8s. Unless you want to learn it for work purposes, it’s so overkill you can spend a month before you get things running. I know from experience. My current setup gives you options and has been reliable for me.
NAS Box: Truenas Scale - You can have UnRaid fill this role.
Services Hosting: Proxmox - I can spin up any VMs I need and lots of info online to do things like hardware passthrough to VMs.
Containers: Debian VM - Debian makes a great server environment as it’s stable and well supported. I just make this VM a docker swarm host. I managed things with Portainer for a web interface.
I keep data on the NAS and have containers access it over the network. Usually a NFS share.
How do you manage your services on that, docker compose files? I’m really trying to get away from the workflow of clicking around in some UI to configure everything, only for it to glitch out and disappear and I have to try and remember what things to click to get it back. It was my main problem with portainer that caused me to move away from it (I have separate issues with docker-compose but that’s another thing)
I have a similar setup to the above. Personally I use Docker Compose and backup up my compose scripts to the NAS.
I personally stepped away from compose. You mentioned that you want a more declarative setup. Give Ansible a try. It is primarily for config management, but you can easily deploy containerized apps and correlate configs, hosts etc.
I usually write roles for some more specialized setups like my HTTP reverse proxy, the arrs etc. Then I keep everything in my inventory and var files. I’m really happy and I really can tear things down and rebuild quickly. One thing to point out is that the compose module for Ansible is basically unusable. I use the docker container module instead. Works well so far and it keeps my containers running without restarting them unnecessarily.
Proxmox. Currently considering upgrading from a single node to a 3 node Cluster for Ceph.
You should try out all the options you listed and the other recommendations and find what works best for you.
I personally use Kubernetes. It can be overwhelming but if you’re willing to learn some new jargon then try a managed kubernetes cluster. Like AKS or digital ocean kubernetes. I would avoid managing a kubernetes cluster yourself.
Kubernetes gets a lot of flack for being overly complicated but what is being overlooked with that statement is all the things that kubernetes does for you.
If you can spin up kubernetes with cert-manager, external-dns, and an ingress controller like istio then you got a whole automated data center for your docker containers.
I agree with this, though it’s not the easiest option. Ceph is amazing for storage, I am using mini pc nucs for my cluster and to expand storage I simply plan to add nodes and get the largest sata and m.2 SSD.
I recently setup velero for automated backups. It even is configured to dump my HA postgrrd DB and then backup the dump folder.
Other cool experiences I can think of is netdata with Prometheus metrics auto scraping pods by their annotations to pull their statistics in, and nothing is more satisfying then making a service highly available.
Thanks. Yeah I’m temped to try kubernetes because of what you mentioned. I really like that every part that I need (ingress controller, certs, etc) are considered part of the core service and are built in. Right now I just have to run that stuff like it’s own service and wire everything up by hand. I don’t think I mind the extra overhead of kubernetes either, I love to tinker with that sort of thing anyway!
I think I will try a couple of things though. Maybe find a set of services to deploy with each and compare the experiences.
Well the kubernetes API has all the necessary parts built in mostly, although sometimes you may want to install a custom resource which often comes with complex service installs.
But I think the biggest strength of kubernetes is all the foss projects that are available for it. Specifically external-dns, cert-manager, and istio. These are separate projects and will have to be installed after the cluster is up.
You can also look at the cloud native computing foundation’s list of projects. It’s a good list of things that work well.
Caution, not all cloud providers support istio. I know that Google’s GKS doesn’t, they make you use their own fork of it
I would also recommend you avoid helm if possible as it obfuscates what the cluster is doing and might make learning harder. Try to just stick to using kubectl if possible.
I have heard good things about nomad too but I have yet to try it.
