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?
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Kubernetes is useful if you have gone full cattle over pets. And that is very uncommon in home setups. If you only own one or two small machines you cannot destroy infra easily in a “cattle” way, and the bloatware that comes with Kubernetes doesn’t help you neither.
In homelabs and home servers the pros of Kubernetes are not very useful: high availability, auto-scaling, gitops integrations, etc: Why would you need autoscaling and HA for a SFTP used only by you? Instead you write a docker-compose.yml and call it a day.
The one exception to this is if you’re using your homelab to learn kubernetes.
That was the only time I used K8s and k3s on my homelab.
And for anything that I do want to set up in a HA/cattle kind of way, I use Docker Swarm, as it feels like a more comfortable extension of docker compose.
This right here
While you’re probably right overall, there are many good reasons to use k8s. The api provides all sorts of benefits. Kubectl, k9s, and other operational UIs . Good deployment models and tools like argo. Loads of helm charts that are (theoretically) ready to use.
No, those things aren’t free. There’s a lot of overhead to running k8s.
This mostly, I haven’t seen a compelling reason to leave my docker setup.
I think the biggest reasons for me have been growth and professional development. I started my home cluster 8 years ago as a single node of basically just running the hack/ scripts on my Linux desktop. I’ve been able to grow that same cluster to 6 hosts as I’ve replaced desktops and as I got a bit into the used enterprise server scene. I’ve replaced multiple routers and moved behind cloudflare, added a private CA a few times, added solid persistence with rook+ceph, and built my ideal telemetry stack, added velero backups into Backblaze b2, and probably a lot more I’m not thinking of.
That whole time, I’ve had to do almost zero maintenance or upgrades on the side projects I’ve built over the years, or on the self hosted services I’ve run. If you ignore the day or so a year I’ve spent cursing my propensity to upgrade a tad too early and hit snags, though I’ve just about always been able to resolve them pretty quickly and have learned even more from those times.
And on top of that, I get to take a lot of that expertise to work where it happens to pay quite well. And I’ve spent some time working towards building the knowledge into a side gig. Maybe someday that’ll pay the bills too.
One line from your comment struck a chord. The part about maintenance and upgrades. I feel like I get stuff set up and working and go about my life and then a failure happens at the most inopportune moment. Mostly, the failures are when I have a few hours free and decide to upgrade the OS and everything breaks and all the dependencies fall apart and some feature is no longer supported. That’s where I started looking to K8s to just roll back until I have time to manage it.
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.
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You can use kubernetes on any OCI container deployment.
So if you don’t want/need to install the docker program, you can go with containerd.
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.
Wow you’re self-hosting a password manager! Don’t you feel scared if something went wrong?
I’m also running Adguard as my DNS-level adblocker on my Pi 3. Feels way more content than Pihole.
Kubernetes is great if you run lots of services and/or already use kubernetes at work. I use it all the time and I’ve learned a lot on my personal cluster that I’ve taken to work to improve their systems. If you’re used to managing infra already then it’s not that much more work, and it’s great to be able to shutdown a server for maintenance and not have to worry about more than a brief blip on your home services.
I manage like 200 servers in Google cloud k8s but I don’t think I’d do that for home use. The core purpose is to manage multiple servers and assign processes between them, auto scaling, cluster internal network - running docker containers for single instance apps for personal use doesn’t require this kind of complexity
My NAS software has a docker thing just built into it. I can upload or specify a package and it just runs it on the local hardware. If you have a Linux shell, I guess all you really have to do is run
dockerdto start the daemon, make sure your network config allows connections, and upload your docker containers to it for runningSeems a bit overkill for a personal use selfhosting set-up.
Personally, I don’t need anything that requires multiple replicas and loadbalencers.
Do people who have homelabs actually need them? Or is it just for learning?
I find mine useful as both a learning process and as a thing need. I don’t like using cloud services where possible so I can set things up to replace having to rely on those such as next loud for storage, plex and some *arr servers for media etc. And I think once you put the hardware and power costs vs what I’d pay for all the subs (particularly cloud storage costs) it comes out cheaper at least with hardware I’m using.
Yes, those are all great uses of it. But could all still be achieved with docker containers running on some machines at home, right?
Have you ever had a situation where features provided by kubernetes (like replicas, load balancers, etc) came in handy?
I’m not criticizing, I’m genuinely curious if there’s a use-case for kubernetes for personal self-hosting (besides learning).
A lot of people thought this was the case for VMs and docker as well, and now it seems to be the norm.
A lot of people thought this was the case for VMs and docker as well, and now it seems to be the norm.
Yes, but docker does provide features that are useful at the level of a hobbyist self-hosting a few services for personal use (e.g. reproducibility). I like using docker and ansible to set up my systems, as I can painlessly reproduce everything or migrate to a different VPS in a few minutes.
But kubernetes seems overkill. None of my services have enough traffic to justify replicas, I’m the only user.
Besides learning (which is a valid reason), I don’t see why one would bother setting it up at home. Unless there’s a very specific use-case I’m missing.
For me, I find that I learn more effectively when I have a goal. Sure, it’s great to follow somebody’s “Hello World” web site tutorial, but the real learning comes when I start to extend it to include CI/CD for example.
As far as a use case, I’d say that learning IS the use case.
Kubernetes is awesome for self hosting, but tbh is superpower isn’t multi-node/scalability/clustering shenanigans, it’s that because every bit of configuration is just an object in the API, you can really easily version control everything - charts and config in git, tools like Helm make applying changes super easy, use Renovate to do automatic updates, use your CI tool of choice to deploy on commit, leverage your hobby into a DevOps role, profit
The Lemmy instance I’m speaking from right now is running in my k8s cluster.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System Git Popular version control system, primarily for code HA Home Assistant automation software ~ High Availability HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web LXC Linux Containers NAS Network-Attached Storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) k8s Kubernetes container management package nginx Popular HTTP server
11 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 11 acronyms.
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HA is high availability. Home Assistant is usually shortened to HASS.
It does list that as another possible meaning, if I’m reading the table correctly
Good catch! I didn’t notice that.
Went swarm instead. I dont need a department of k8s consultants.
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.
I like the concept, but hate the configuration schema and tooling which is all needlessly obtuse (eg. helm)
Helm is one of the reasons I became interested in Kubernetes. I really like the idea of a package where all I have to do is provide my preferences in a values file. Before swarm was mature, I was managing my containers with complicated shell scripts to bring stuff up in the right order and it became fragile and unmaintainable.
Nomad all the way. K8s is so bloated. Docker swarm can only do docker. Nomad can do basically anything.
It’s a damn shame it’s going not free open source, I Just switched my lab over to nomad and consul last year and it has been incredibly smooth sailing.
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.
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 run a 2 node k3s cluster. There are a few small advantages over docker swarm, built-in network policies to lock down my VPN/Torrent pod being the main one.
Other than that writing kubernetes yaml files is a lot more verbose than docker-compose. Helm does make it bearable, though.
Due to real-life my migration to the cluster is real slow, but the goal is to move all my services over.
It’s not “better” than compose but I like it and it’s nice to have worked with it.
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’d love to hear more about your GitHub to K8s setup. I’ve been thinking about doing something similar, but I’m not sure how to keep my public stuff public while injecting my personalized (private) configuration during deployment.
