Hi all, I’ve been venturing for months in this amazing self-hosted hobby and for the last couple of days I’m reading and trying to understand kubernetes a bit more, I’ve followed this article :
that helps you set up the lightweight Kubernetes version (K3s) and use Portainer as your management dashboard, and it works flawlessly, as you guys can see I’m just using two nodes at the moment.
And I’m using “helm” to install packages and the site ArtifactHUB to get ready to use repository to add into portainer Helm section (still in beta) but works flawlessly, I’ve installed some packages and the apps works just as I expected, but there’s seem to be a shortage of ready to use repository as it’s the case with docker alone, like with Plex the only way I got plex running in K3s is with KubeSail with offers an unofficial apps section that includes plex and tons of other well known apps, but strangely enough there are labeled unofficial but still works perfect when installed, but portainer would label all apps installed from KubeSail as external.
Now I think I get the use of kubernetes, it’s to have several nodes to use as recourses for your apps and also like a load balance if one node fails your services/apps can keep on running? (like raid for harddisks?)
All tough it was fun learning atleast the basic of Kubernetes with my two nodes, is it really necessary to go full blown out with only kubernetes? Or is Docker just fine for the majority of us homelad self hosted folks?
And is what I’m learning here the same in enterprise environments? Atleast the basics?
I am currently setting up my home server using Ansible and I’d say 50% of my time/energy is trying to make it as idempotent as possible. Things like ok I want my service started but I want to restart it if it changed etc.
Although the main downside with k8s is that I don’t think you can do much low level/privileged stuff. Like setting up a VPN for a single container, accessing devices for monitoring etc.