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.
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.
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.
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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.