42 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
42 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
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---
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title: "Kubernetes at Home"
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date: 2023-11-08T18:33:13-05:00
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draft: false
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---
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I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a sweet little Poweredge R710, a older Dell 2U system.
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They came in alot of configurations, but mine happened to come configured with two quad core Xeon CPUs, 64 gigs of ram, and six drive bays.
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Its not terribly power efficient, fast, or quiet, but it sure is fun.
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So with the addition of this machine, I decided to embark on tackling running [Kubernetes](https://kubernetes.io) at home, specficially [k3s](https://k3s.io).
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To be honest, other than pure curiosity, and the desire to leverage all the compute available to me, I don't really have a good reason for doing this.
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Something something overcomplicating, but who cares! This is all just for fun, and for me to learn, so its impact is pretty small (other than my sanity).
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So I followed [Funky Penguin's](https://geek-cookbook.funkypenguin.co.nz/) guide to k3s, at least as a starting point. I definitly didn't do what he
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does one-to-one, partly because I didn't fully understand why he did some of the layouts he did. Prior to this, my experience with kubernetes was
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limited to [TrueNAS](https://www.truenas.com/) and some light kubernetes stuff I experimented with in college, so I went in pretty much blind.
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If you want to know the details, you can find my [Flux](https://www.truenas.com/) repo [here](https://git.clortox.com/Infrastructure/Gluttony-Cluster).
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I'll spare a bunch of the technical details on my specific implementation, as it is both bound to change,
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and I really don't know enough to make strong comments on it.
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I've found over the less than one month I've had this, that it really has been worth the work. I like the even distrobution across my machines.
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I've found the reasonably high up time to be very useful, as I can worry less about a container dying and inevitably getting
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some complaint from friends and family about it. Once you get it set up, its pretty set and forget for the most part.
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Now the setup is by far the worst part. If you have limited familiarity with kubernetes like myself, you may find that its pretty
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frustrating at first, and somewhat tricky to get your head around. Once you work with it for a few hours setting up a cluster,
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it becomes far more intuitive, however that first part of the journey is tough. I set aside a weekend to get it rolling, and got some basic
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services running like [Longhorn](https://longhorn.io), Postgres, Redis, [Minio](https://min.io), etc. Basically just stuff everything else would need.
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There was a minuite that I wanted to replicate a full cloud provider, however I'm finding that I both do not need it, and its really not worth the hassle.
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I'm fine with running a few containers as opposed to having a deticated serverless runtime for an at home cluster that will get limited usage.
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The cost has been pretty low, as I have only have three machines running everything currently, and they are all both old and purchased for free/cheap.
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I am currently working on getting my main desktop to join in the cluster at certain times of day, to support its usage when I'm away from the desktop.
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When I do implement that, though, I will for sure be writing up a guide to doing this.
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If you also want to try this, I'm willing to provide any guidance I can, just shoot me an email with any questions.
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