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The next homelab evolution & Static Site

Introduction

Over the last few months, I decided to learn kubernetes.

Now- I am a pretty technical person. I have computers and old enterprise hardware all over my house. I have been a software developer for over a decade now...

I previous had multiple docker servers running nearly 100 combined containers in my lab.

Warning

Spoiler! There was indeed a steep learning curve associated with kubernetes.

You will often see people posting demonstrations of their setups online, posting how amazing it is, etc- but, you will hardly ever see the work which went into it, and the failures encountered.

I personally, failed quite a few times before achieving an environment for which I am happy with. I spent on and off- nearly two months finding what works, and what doesn't work.

I had to wade through depreciated software1. I have encountered software which has not properly been updated2. And- lots more.

The bright side

However- after repeated efforts to build a cluster to my specifications- I was successful.

Not only successful, but, I REALLY like Kubernetes. There are things you can do here- which were quite a bit more difficult, or not even possible using docker.

The moral of this story-

Quote

If at First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again - Xen Cho 3

A few topics I plan on addressing in the near future.

In the future- I plan on covering a few of the features I am really pleased with in more details.

  1. Single Sign On, Using Authentik
  2. Backups using Veeam/Kasten
  3. Automated Monitoring and Data collection via Promthesis and Grafana using the Prometheus-Operator
  4. Automatically allocating GPUs for transcoding in Plex using Intel Device Plugin and Node Feature Discovery
  5. Using Ansible within Kubernetes to automatically provision servers, and build / push custom docker images. (This site runs on a custom container build using ansible.)
  6. How to get your Coral TPU, Z-wave stick, and RTL_SDR working within a multi-node kubernetes cluster.
  7. Rook-Ceph, and why I chose to use it over Longhorn.io
  8. Why and how I decided to post a static blog over using my existing Wordpress

  1. See https://github.com/rancher/k3os/issues/846. TLDR; When OpenSUSE acquired rancher- a few... support... issues arose. ↩

  2. Longhorn took over a year to remove pod security policy from their helm charts, despite it being depreciated in kubernetes v1.21. See github issue HERE. For a new-user trying to follow the setup directions on a current, up to date kubernetes cluster- this caused a lot of issues. ↩

  3. Reference ↩