Justin

not to mention there are 48 and 64gb dimms out now too that work with basically all alder lake atoms

Yeah, what you’re talking about is called GitOps. Using git as the single source of truth for your infrastructure. I have this set up for my home servers.

https://codeberg.org/jlh/h5b

nodes has NixOS configuration for my 5 kubernetes servers and a script that builds a flash drive for each of them to use as a boot drive (same setup for porygonz, but that’s my dedicated DHCP/DNS/NTP mini server)

mikrotik has a dump of my Mikrotik router config and a script that deploys the config from the git repo.

applications has all my kubernetes config: containers, proxies, load balancers, config files, certificate renewal, databases, clustered raid, etc. It’s all super automated. A pretty typical “operator” container to run in Kubernetes is ArgoCD, which watches a git repo and automatically deploys any changes or desyncs back to the Kubernetes API so it’s always in sync with git. I don’t use any GUI or console commands to deploy or update a container, I just edit git and commit.

The kubernetes cluster runs about 400 containers, most of them just automatic replicas of services for high-availability. Of course there’s always some manual setup steps outside of git, like partitioning drives, joining the nodes to the cluster, writing hardware-specific config, and bootstrapping Argocd to watch git. But overall, my house could burn down tomorrow and I would have everything I need to redeploy using this git repo, the secrets git repo, and my backups of my databases and container /data dirs.

I think Portainer supports doing GitOps on Docker compose? Never used it.

https://docs.portainer.io/user/docker/stacks/add

Argocd is really the gold standard for GitOps though. I highly recommend trying out k3s on a server and running ArgoCD on it, it’s super easy to use.

https://argo-cd.readthedocs.io/en/stable/getting_started/

Kubernetes is definitely different than Docker Compose, and tutorials are usually written for Docker compose.yml, not Kubernetes Deployments, but It’s super powerful and automated. Very hard to crash once you have it running. I don’t think it’s as scary as a lot of people think, and you definitely don’t need more than one server to run it.

nah you’re probably not going to get any benefits from it. The best way to make your setup more maintainable is to start putting your compose/kubernetes configuration in git, if you’re not already.

Ah, no, Kopia uses a shared bucket.

Seems like a good way to do it.

Keep in mind Kopia has some weirdness when it comes to transferring repos between filesystem and S3, so you’d probably want to only keep one repo.
https://kopia.discourse.group/t/exported-s3-storage-backup/3560

Backblaze B2 is a cheap S3 provider. Hetzner storage box is even cheaper, but it doesn’t support S3 natively, so you’re likely to run into issues with the kopia repo compatibility I mentioned.

5380 USD here. About a quarter of that was my steam deck and my Index. About 250 USD a year on average spent on just games then 🤔

PHP does actually scale better than something like Lemmy which is written in rust

But sure, you can act like you know more than the Nextcloud devs

Isn’t Opencloud just extended Nextcloud? (Still PHP)

https://nextcloud.com/blog/opencloud-the-digitally-sovereign-workspace-from-hkn-univention-and-nextcloud/

Also, nextcloud core components are written in Rust, the PHP just handles incoming requests.

https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-faster-than-ever-introducing-files-high-performance-back-end/

That is not the official goal of the patent system in any country, and any behavior like that should be stopped.

Buy used Samsung pm983s on ebay. Super cheap, super fast, and they have power-loss protection. Only downside is that they’re M.2 22110, not m.2 2280. There’s also a bunch of cheap Samsung and hgst u.2 drives on eBay, but you’ll need an adapter.

The sqlite database that Jellyfin uses tends to get corrupted easily, especially if the disk gets full.

The main big feature that Jellyfin devs are working right now is a complete overhaul of the internal database system:

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/13047

Yeah, I think you pick up things from all over the place as a consultant. I see lots of different environments and learn from them.

Ah yeah, external-dns operator is great! it’s maybe a bit basic at times but its super convenient to just have A/AAAA records appear for all your loadbalancer svcs and HTTPRoutes. Saves a ton of time.

That’s super unfortunate that the certs are siloed off. Maybe they can give you a NS record for a subdomain for you to use ACME on? I’ve seen that at some customers. Super important that all engineers have access to self-service certs, imo.

Rook is great! It definitely can be quite picky about hardware and balancing, as I’ve learned from trying to set it up with two nodes at home with spare hdds and ssds 😅 Very automated once it’s all set up and you understand its needs, though. NFS provisioner is also a good option for a storageclass as a first step, that’s what I used in my homelab from 2021 to 2023.

Heres my rook config:
https://codeberg.org/jlh/h5b/src/branch/main/argo/external_applications/rook-ceph-helm.yaml
https://codeberg.org/jlh/h5b/src/branch/main/argo/custom_applications/rook-ceph

Up to 3 nodes and 120TiB now and I’m about to add 4 more nodes. I probably would recommend just automatically adding disks instead of manually adding them, I’m just a bit more cautious and manual with my homelab “pets”.

I’m not very far on my RHCE yet tbh 😅 Red hat courses are a bit hard to follow 😅 But hopefully will make some progress before the summer.

The CKA and CKS certs are great! Some really good courses for those on udemy and acloudguru, there’s a good lab environment on killer.sh, and the practice exams are super useful. I definitely recommend those certs, you learn a lot and it’s a good way to demonstrate your expertise.

Well, my point was to explain how Kubernetes simplifies devops to the point of being simpler than most proxmox or Ansible setups. That’s especially true if you have a platform/operations team managing the cluster for you.

Some more details missed here would be that external-dns and cert-manager operators usually handle the DNS records and certs for you in k8s, you just have to specify the hostname in the HTTPRoute/VirtualService and in the Certificate. For storage, ansible probably simplifies some of this away, but LVM is likely more manual to set up and manage than pointing a PVC at a storageclass and saying “100Gi”.

Either way, I appreciate the discussion, it’s always good to compare notes on production setups. No hard feelings even in the case that we disagree on things. I’m a Red Hat Openshift consultant myself these days, working on my RHCE, so maybe we’ll cross paths some day in a Red Hat environment!

You’re not using a reverse proxy on rhel, so you’ll need to also make sure that the ports you want are available, and set up a dns record for it, and set up certbot.

On k8s, I believe istio gateways are meant to be reused across services. You’re using a reverse proxy so the ports will already be open, so no need to use firewall-cmd. What would be wrong with the Service included in the elasticsearch chart?

It’s also worth looking at the day 2 implications.

For backups you’re looking at bespoke cronjobs to either rsync your database or clone your entire 100gb disk image, compared to either using velero or backing up your underlying storage.

For updates, you need to run system updates manually on rhel, likely requiring a full reboot of the node, while in kubernetes, renovate can handle rolling updates in the background with minimal downtime. Not to mention the process required to find a new repo when rhel 11 comes out.

There’s much more tooling for containerd containers than there is for LXC

I have 33 database servers in my homelab across 11 postgres clusters, all with automated barman backups to S3.

Here is the entire config for the db cluster that runs my Lemmy instance

This stuff is all automated these days.

Yeah I’m not saying everybody has to go and delete their infra, I just think that all new production environments should be k8s by default.

The production-scale Grafana LGTM stack only runs on Kubernetes fwiw. Docker and VMs are not supported. I’m a bit surprised that Kubernetes wouldn’t have enough availability to be able to co-locate your general workloads and your observability stack, but that’s totally fair to segment those workloads.

I’ve heard the argument that “kubernetes has more moving parts” a lot, and I think that is a misunderstanding. At a base level, all computers have infinite moving parts. QEMU has a lot of moving parts, containerd has a lot of moving parts. The reason why people use kubernetes is that all of those moving parts are automated and abstracted away to reduce the daily cognitive load for us operations folk. As an example, I don’t run manual updates for minor versions in my homelab. I have a k8s CronJob that runs renovate, which goes and updates my Deployments in git, and ArgoCD automatically deploys the changes. Technically that’s a lot of moving parts to use, but it saves me a lot of manual work and thinking, and turns my whole homelab into a sort of automated cloud service that I can go a month without thinking about.

I’m not sure if container break-out attacks are a reasonable concern for homelabs. See the relatively minor concern in the announcement I made as an Unraid employee last year when Leaky Vessels happened. Keep in mind that containerd uses cgroups under the hood.

Yeah, apparmor/selinux isn’t very popular in the k8s space. I think it’s easy enough to use them, plenty of documentation out there; but Openshift/okd is the only distribution that runs it out of the box.

Sure!

I haven’t used quadlets yet, but I did set up a few systemd services for containers back in the day before quadlets came out. I also used to use docker compose back in 2017/2018.

Docker compose and Kubernetes are very similar as a homelab admin. Docker compose syntax is a little less verbose, and it has some shortcuts for storage and networking. But that also means it’s less flexible if you are doing more complex things. Docker compose doesn’t start containers on boot by default I think(?) which is pretty bad for application hosting. Docker-compose has no way of automatically deploying from git like ArgoCD does.

Kubernetes also has a lot of self-healing automation, like health checks that can either disable the load balancer and/or restart the container if an app is failing, automatic killing of containers when resources are low, preventing the scheduling of new containers when resources are low, gradual roll-out of containers so that the old version of a container doesn’t get killed until the new version is up and healthy (helpful in case the new config is broken), mounting secrets as files in a container, and automatic retry on failed containers.

There’s also a lot of ubiquitous automation tools in the Kubernetes space, like cert-manager for setting up certificates (both ACME and local CA), Ingress for setting up reverse proxy, CNPG for setting up postgres clusters with automated backups, and first-class instrumentation/integration with prometheus and loki (both were designed for kubernetes first).

The main downsides with Kubernetes in a homelab is that there is about a 1-2GiB RAM overhead for small clusters, and most documentation and examples are written for docker-compose, so you have to convert apps into a Deployment (you get used to writing deployments for new apps though). I would say installing things like Ingress or CNPG is probably easier than installing similar reverse-proxy automations on Docker-compose, though.

Not QEMU in particular, poor phrasing on my part. I just mean setting up new environments that run applications on VMs.

Yeah, definitely true.

I’m a big fan of single-node kubernetes though, tbh. Kubernetes is an automation platform first and foremost, so it’s super helpful to use Kubernetes in a homelab even if you only have one node.