cluster-template VS external-dns

it's become much easier in the last few years. Talos + Flux + Renovate can be built in a day [0], and simplifies storage/backups/patching even for single-node clusters. There's also a great community, with services like kubesearch [1] providing templates for tons of apps

[0] https://github.com/onedr0p/cluster-template

[1] https://kubesearch.dev

I've been self-hosting a lot of things on a home kubernetes cluster lately, though via gitops using flux (apparently this genre is now home-ops?). I was kind of expecting this article to be along those lines, using the fairly popular gitops starting template cluster-template: https://github.com/onedr0p/cluster-template

I set one of these up on a few cheap odroid-h4's, and have quite enjoyed having a fairly automated (though quite complex of course) setup, that has centralized logging, metrics, dashboards, backup, etc. by copying/adapting other people's setups.

Instead of weechat, I went with a nice web based irc client (the lounge) to replace my irccloud subscription. kubesearch makes it easy to find other people's configs to learn from (https://kubesearch.dev/hr/ghcr.io-bjw-s-helm-app-template-th...).

For populating a homelab Kubernetes cluster, onedr0p has a very nice Flux template: https://github.com/onedr0p/cluster-template

k8s is a lot easier for homelabs than it used to be, and imo it's quicker than nix for building a declarative homelab. templates like this one can deploy a cluster in a few hours: https://github.com/onedr0p/cluster-template

here's my home assistant deployment as a single file: https://github.com/pl4nty/homelab/blob/main/kubernetes/clust...

I deliberately nuked my onprem cluster a few weeks ago, and was fully restored within 2 hours (including host OS reinstalls). and most of that was waiting for backup restores over my slow internet connection

example repo: https://github.com/onedr0p/flux-cluster-template

Magical setups like this often get a lot of bad rap, but if you already understand Ansible and know Linux etc, you might find this repo a good start to building out your own cluster using gitops: https://github.com/onedr0p/flux-cluster-template

more of an end-to-end solution than a build-it-yourself, but this was a huge help in my understanding of k8s and the other tech like gitops - https://github.com/onedr0p/flux-cluster-template

The second one is a combination of tools: External DNS, cert-manager, and NGINX ingress. Using these as a stack, you can quickly deploy an application, making it available through a DNS with a TLS without much effort via simple annotations. When I first discovered External DNS, I was amazed at its quality.

One of the reasons why I chose Hetzner was that it WAS supported by the ExternalDNS project. I didn't quite understand why the Hetzner provider was pulled, but I saw that an attempt of re-adding it was refused, on the ground that the upcoming webhook architecture would have allowed to better maintain providers.

Write a custom controller for the external DNS controller, or setup some form of ArgoCD app / appset templating.

so I am looking at having an automated way for new routers registered in Traefik to also have the corresponding DNS entry added to my Pihole instance similar to external-dns but obviously, this is exclusive to ingress on k8s environments. my current setup is traefik in a container on unraid.

You technically don’t need to run a load balancer or have a virtual IP for your control plane. If you control your dns, you can add an A record pointing to all IPs for your control plane nodes. It won’t load balance your traffic, but combined with something like External DNS it gives you HA for the control plane.

I normally deploy external-dns, which automatically updates DNS with the ingress controller's external IP address.

Background: Having a look I can see this https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/external-dns

3) Use the Kubernetes External-DNS. I've never used this, but this is assuming it can update DNS for each pods/app to point to the correct Node (it'd need to update my Homelab DNS running on Windows Server)

So here’s the solution I have taken for our current stack. EKS and its dependencies are created through terraform using the eks module as well as provision a route53 subdomain and a wildcard cert. Once we have that created, I have installed this deployment into the cluster via the helm module: https://kubernetes-sigs.github.io/aws-load-balancer-controller/v2.4/. This allows me to use kuberentes resources (load balancers or ingress objects) and it will handle all the provisioning of load balancers and security groups for me, based on my application yaml and annotations. We also use https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/external-dns to manage all of our specific host names for the applications through annotations. So to generally put, terraform manages out Kubernetes clusters, and Kubernetes manages the deployment of anything needed for the application including volumes, load balancers, hostnames though Kubernetes system deployments

Metallb for your load balancer (layer2 mode will do) NginX-ingress, will be spot on for internal home apps External-dns to publish your dns record to your Dns server at home, https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/external-dns