Many of the posts I read here are about Docker. Is anybody using Kubernetes to manage their self hosted stuff? For those who’ve tried it and went back to Docker, why?
I’m doing my 3rd rebuild of a K8s cluster after learning things that I’ve done wrong and wanted to start fresh, but when enhancing my Docker setup and deciding between K8s and Docker Swarm, I decided on K8s for the learning opportunities and how it could help me at work.
What’s your story?
I have a K3OS cluster built out of a bunch of raspberry pis, it works well.
The big reason I like kubernetes is that once it is up and running with git ops style management, adding another service becomes trivial.
I just copy paste one if my e is ting services, tweak the names/namespaces, and then change the specific for the pods to match what their docker configuration needs, ie what folders need mounting and any other secrets or configs.
I then just commit the changes to github and apply them to the cluster.
The process of being able to roll back changes via git is awesome
I am insane and use bare bone LXC.
Stupid ramblings you can probably ignore:
spoiler
Usually though it’s because I run most stuff bare metal anyway so LXC is for temporary or random cases where I need a weird dependency or I want to run a niche service.
Only use docker for when I actually want faster setup like docker-osx which does all the vm stuff for running a virtual Mac for you.
I don’t really mind docker, but for homelab I just find myself rewriting dockerfile anytime I want to change something which I don’t really need to do if I’m not publishing it or even reusing it.
Kubernates is really more effective for actual load services, which you never need in homelab lol. It’s great to use to learn k8s cluster, but the resources get eaten fast.
Docker with or without Compose and systemd is good enough for most of my use cases. SaltStack is good enough for config-as-code.
I’ve spent the last two weeks on getting a k3s cluster working and I’ve had nothing but problems but it has been a great catalysts for learning new tools like ansible and load balancers. I finally got the cluster working last night. If anyone else is having wierd issues with the cluster timing out ETCD needs fast storage. Moving my VMs from my spinning rust to a cheap SSD fixed all my problems.
K3s seems pretty cool
Its k3s because its fast and light. It can run on a single core with 512mb of ram
