Hey! I have been using Ansible to deploy Dockers for a few services on my Raspberry Pi for a while now and it’s working great, but I want to learn MOAR and I need help…

Recently, I’ve been considering migrating to bare metal K3S for a few reasons:

  • To learn and actually practice K8S.
  • To have redundancy and to try HA.
  • My RPi are all already running on MicroOS, so it kind of make sense to me to try other SUSE stuff (?)
  • Maybe eventually being able to manage my two separated servers locations with a neat k3s + Tailscale setup!

Here is my problem: I don’t understand how things are supposed to be done. All the examples I find feel wrong. More specifically:

  • Am I really supposed to have a collection of small yaml files for everything, that I use with kubectl apply -f ?? It feels wrong and way too “by hand”! Is there a more scripted way to do it? Should I stay with everything in Ansible ??
  • I see little to no example on how to deploy the service containers I want (pihole, navidrome, etc.) to a cluster, unlike docker-compose examples that can be found everywhere. Am I looking for the wrong thing?
  • Even official doc seems broken. Am I really supposed to run many helm commands (some of them how just fails) and try and get ssl certs just to have Rancher and its dashboard ?!

I feel that having a K3S + Traefik + Longhorn + Rancher on MicroOS should be straightforward, but it’s really not.

It’s very much a noob question, but I really want to understand what I am doing wrong. I’m really looking for advice and especially configuration examples that I could try to copy, use and modify!

Thanks in advance,

Cheers!

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
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    12 days ago

    I’ll post more later (reply here to remind me), but I have your exact setup. It’s a great way to learn k8s and yes, it’s going to be an uphill battle for learning - but the payoff is worth it. Both for your professional career and your homelab. It’s the big leagues.

    For your questions, no to all of them. Once you learn some of it the rest kinda falls together.

    I’m going into a meeting, but I’ll post here with how I do it later. In the mean time, pick one and only one container you want to get started with. Stateless is easier to start with compared to something that needs volumes. Piece by piece brick by brick you will add more to your knowledge and understanding. Don’t try to take it all on day one. First just get a container running. Then access via a port and http. Then proxy. Then certs. Piece by piece, brick by brick. Take small victories, if you try to say “tomorrow everything will be on k8s” you’re setting yourself up for anger and frustration.

    • Justin@lemmy.jlh.nameEnglish
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      12 days ago

      Very true. Each brick you lay upgrades your setup and your skillset. There are very few mistakes in Kubernetes as long as you make sure your state is backed up.

    • Sunoc@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
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      10 days ago

      Wow that’s a lot of detail and information ! Thank you so much for taking the time to write all of this !

      For the note taking part, it should be okay, I’m putting everything in my org-roam notes, including my current Ansible setup and my microOS combustion script!

      For the rest, I’ll need to try it step by step; at the moment I think my problem is actually how to access the services with Traefik, I guess it will be an important step once I’ll figure it out.

      Thanks again for the help!