diff --git a/content/posts/kubernetes-at-home/index.md b/content/posts/kubernetes-at-home/index.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3c9377f --- /dev/null +++ b/content/posts/kubernetes-at-home/index.md @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +--- +title: "Kubernetes at Home" +date: 2023-11-08T18:33:13-05:00 +draft: false +--- + +I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a sweet little Poweredge R710, a older Dell 2U system. +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. +Its not terribly power efficient, fast, or quiet, but it sure is fun. + +![](poweredge.jpg) + +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). +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. +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). + +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 +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 +limited to [TrueNAS](https://www.truenas.com/) and some light kubernetes stuff I experimented with in college, so I went in pretty much blind. + +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). +I'll spare a bunch of the technical details on my specific implementation, as it is both bound to change, +and I really don't know enough to make strong comments on it. + +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. +I've found the reasonably high up time to be very useful, as I can worry less about a container dying and inevitably getting +some complaint from friends and family about it. Once you get it set up, its pretty set and forget for the most part. + +Now the setup is by far the worst part. If you have limited familiarity with kubernetes like myself, you may find that its pretty +frustrating at first, and somewhat tricky to get your head around. Once you work with it for a few hours setting up a cluster, +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 +services running like [Longhorn](https://longhorn.io), Postgres, Redis, [Minio](https://min.io), etc. Basically just stuff everything else would need. + +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. +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. + +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. +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. +When I do implement that, though, I will for sure be writing up a guide to doing this. + +If you also want to try this, I'm willing to provide any guidance I can, just shoot me an email with any questions. diff --git a/content/posts/kubernetes-at-home/poweredge.jpg b/content/posts/kubernetes-at-home/poweredge.jpg new file mode 100644 index 0000000..dd917a8 Binary files /dev/null and b/content/posts/kubernetes-at-home/poweredge.jpg differ