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?
So here’s my take. I’m not a devops guy professionally. I started my homelab with docker. The problem was the number things I was hosting kept growing and I was worried of loading the machine. I had a few other machines lying around that I decided to pull into a k3s. I somehow love it. My entire home lab is now stored with IaC and lives in a GitHub with CI/CD. Any changes I make to the repo are automatically deployed to the cluster. If I need to Takedown a machine I don’t need to worry about loss of service. I also use velero for backups. If things go wrong a few commands and my entire cluster is fully restored from backups. Now I can easily agree that kubernetes is overkill for a homelab. But I feel it offers some convenience in terms of administration. For docker I still had to deploy everything by portainer which I hadn’t found a way to automate. Backup and restore was not fully automated. You could backup the data but you had to manually redeploy your apps and then restore data to it. At least this was what I could implement. With kubernetes everything is fully in code and controlled by the GitHub repo. Granted the learning curve is steep. Took me 3 months to fully port my system to k3s. Also for general apps check out https://bjw-s.github.io/helm-charts/docs/ You can use that chart to make a helm chart for any app that can be deployed via docker compose. So I just create my own helm charts for apps that only habe docker instructions and deploy it.
TLDR; learning curve is steep but there are a few gains in terms of IaC administration and ability to leverage multiple machines
That velero is https://velero.io/ and thanks for the advice.