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?
Went swarm instead. I dont need a department of k8s consultants.
I was looking into converting my docker services into a cluster to get high availability and to learn it for work, but while investigating it, I read that kubernetes is actually meant for scalability and just a single service per cluster.
Also read that docker swarm is actually what is recommended for my homelab use case. So I’m right now on my way to convert everything to docker stacks. What do you think?
I’m not sure what you mean by that.
It provides high availability if you have multiple nodes and pods.
Also what do you mean by single service per cluster? Because that’s not the idea at all.
Of course high availability always requires multiple nodes.
Its just that while choosing how to set up my cluster I looked up several options (proxmox, swarm, kubernetes…) and I noticed that kubernetes is generally meant for bigger deployments.
I only need a single replica for each of my containers and they can all run on a single node, so kubernetes is overkill just to get high availability For my use case
I run k3s and all my stuff runs in it no need to deal with docker anymore.
I’m not very familiar with kubernetes or k3s but I thought it was a way to manage docker containers. Is that not the case? I’m considering deploying a k3s cluster in my proxmox environment to test it out.
Kubernetes is abbreviated K8s (because there’s 8 letters between the “k” and the “s”. K3s is a “lite” version. Generally speaking, kubernetes manages your containers. You basicaly tell K8s what the state should be and it does what it needs to do to get the environment as you’ve declared. It’ll check and start or restart services, start containers on a node that can run them (like ensuring enough RAM is available). There’s a lot more, but that’s the general idea.
Could you list some of your “stuffs” that you run on your k3s? I’m curious.
Oh it is not that much, I run adguard DNS with adblocking, searxng as my search engine, vaultwarden as my password manager. All combined with Argo CD as GitOps engine, nginx ingress with cert-manager for lets encrypt certificates, longhorn as storage layer and metallb as loadbalancer solution. I am planning to completely replace my current setup (which is an old sandy bridge powered HP microserver) with a turing pi 2 clusterboard with 4 RPi4 CMs as soon as they get cheaper.
Nomad all the way. K8s is so bloated. Docker swarm can only do docker. Nomad can do basically anything.
Nomad is a breath of fresh air after working with k8s professionally.
Don’t get me wrong, love k8s, but it’s a bit much (until you need it)
I’ve been reading into k3s out of curiosity, which as I understand is supposed to be one of the simpler ones, and even as someone who works as a developer and maintains a small homelab, it just makes me feel utterly clueless lol. Which is to say, I’ll definitely be giving Nomad a good look.
Oh and if you do happen to have any other more newbie friendly suggestions, I’d love to hear about them!
There are dozens of us!
Seriously though I changed to nomad/consul/gluster and it’s been wonderful. I still have some other things running on my nas software like Jellyfin and audiobookshelf, but that’s just for performance and simplicity.
I was a bit put off by Hashicorps license change, but I don’t think I’m changing back to k3s anytime soon. Nomad is just so nice and easy.
I feel like it took me quite a while to get the hang of Docker, and Kubernetes on a general look seems all that much more daunting! Hopefully one day I can break it down into smaller pieces so I can get started with it!
