Currently, I run Unraid and have all of my services’ setup there as docker containers. While this is nice and easy to setup initially, it has some major downsides:
- It’s fragile. Unraid is prone to bugs/crashes with docker that take down my containers. It’s also not resilient so when things break I have to log in and fiddle.
- It’s mutable. I can’t use any infrastructure-as-code tools like terraform, and configuration sort of just exist in the UI. I can’t really roll back or recover easily.
- It’s single-node. Everything is tied to my one big server that runs the NAS, but I’d rather have the NAS as a separate fairly low-power appliance and then have a separate machine to handle things like VMs and containers.
So I’m looking ahead and thinking about what the next iteration of my homelab will look like. While I like unraid for the storage stuff, I’m a little tired of wrangling it into a container orchestrator and hypervisor, and I think this year I’ll split that job out to a dedicated machine. I’m comfortable with, and in fact prefer, IaC over fancy UIs and so would love to be able to use terraform or Pulumi or something like that. I would prefer something multi-node, as I want to be able to tie multiple machines together. And I want something that is fault-tolerant, as I host services for friends and family that currently require a lot of manual intervention to fix when they go down.
So the question is: how do you all do this? Kubernetes, docker-compose, Hashicorp Nomad? Do you run k3s, Harvester, or what? I’d love to get an idea of what people are doing and why, so I can get some ideas as to what I might do.
I can’t remember what I was watching, but I remember watching something where they said Kubernetes is designed for something so large in scale that the only reason people have heard about it is because some product manager asked what Google use and then demanded that they use it to replicate the success of Google and subsequently, hobbyists also followed and now a bunch of people are using stuff that’s poorly optimized for such small scale systems.
Haha yeah true, but it does come with the advantage that it’s super prevalent and so has a lot of tools and docs. Nearly every self-hosted service I use has a docs page for how to set it up with Kubernetes. (Although it’s not nearly as prevalent as plain docker)
With a basic understanding of how k8s works and an already running cluster, all one needs to know is how to run a service as a docker file to have it also run in k8s