Hey! I have been using Ansible to deploy Dockers for a few services on my Raspberry Pi for a while now and it’s working great, but I want to learn MOAR and I need help…

Recently, I’ve been considering migrating to bare metal K3S for a few reasons:

  • To learn and actually practice K8S.
  • To have redundancy and to try HA.
  • My RPi are all already running on MicroOS, so it kind of make sense to me to try other SUSE stuff (?)
  • Maybe eventually being able to manage my two separated servers locations with a neat k3s + Tailscale setup!

Here is my problem: I don’t understand how things are supposed to be done. All the examples I find feel wrong. More specifically:

  • Am I really supposed to have a collection of small yaml files for everything, that I use with kubectl apply -f ?? It feels wrong and way too “by hand”! Is there a more scripted way to do it? Should I stay with everything in Ansible ??
  • I see little to no example on how to deploy the service containers I want (pihole, navidrome, etc.) to a cluster, unlike docker-compose examples that can be found everywhere. Am I looking for the wrong thing?
  • Even official doc seems broken. Am I really supposed to run many helm commands (some of them how just fails) and try and get ssl certs just to have Rancher and its dashboard ?!

I feel that having a K3S + Traefik + Longhorn + Rancher on MicroOS should be straightforward, but it’s really not.

It’s very much a noob question, but I really want to understand what I am doing wrong. I’m really looking for advice and especially configuration examples that I could try to copy, use and modify!

Thanks in advance,

Cheers!

  • towerful@programming.devEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    Oh, operators are absolutely the way for “released” things.

    But on bigger projects with lots of different pods etc, it’s a lot of work to make all the CRD definitions, hook all the events, and write all the code to deploy the pods etc.
    Similar to helm charts, I don’t see the point for personal projects. I’m not sharing it with anyone, I don’t need helm/operator abstraction for it.
    And something like cdk8s will generate the yaml for you to inspect. So you can easily validate that you are “doing the right thing” before slinging it into k8s.