cluster-template VS home-ops

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

If you want to explore more about k8s and would like to setup at your home, these 2 repos are the good resource. Wife approved HomeOps driven by Kubernetes and GitOps using Flux - onedr0p/home-ops Husband-approved geeked homelab k8s cluster deployed on 🍏 Mac Minis with Talos Linux; automated via Flux, Renovate and GitHub Actions 🤖 - buroa/k8s-gitops

Evaluating these decisions one by one doesn't make sense. Yes, if you are looking at just the cost of setting up Vaultwarden, there's a significant amount of stuff to learn & practice to keep it up.

But self-hosting scales horizontally. If you already run one service that uses postgres or MySQL, the next service often won't add much of a burden.

For a lot of people, yeah, at present it makes no sense to get started. But the ability to get inertia, to carry the effort, can grow and grow into something really fierce. And even better, there are such good references & starting places out there today. Onedr0p's home-ops is a beautiful example (one among many) of investing hard on really good tools up front, so that the incrental cost of adding and managing new things is fantastically low. Years ago we would have to diy much of this, but today onedr0p can use well known community tools like Kubernetes, Flux ci/CD, gitops, and helm to get it done, to have other smart making the tools of self-hosting better for him. He's still the self hosting, but there's a sizable % of the engineering talent of the world helping to make his self hosting better & easier. That's pretty novel, and pretty excellent imo. https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops

These are great operational wins. Agreed very much that having autonomic (can fix itself) systems at your back is a massive game changer. De-crustifies the act of running things.

The other win is that there's a substantial cultural base to this way to go. Folks have been doing selfhosting for ages, but everyone has their own boutique setup some their way. A couple tools and techniques could be shared, but mostly everyone took blank slate configs & built their own system up, & added their own monitoring & operational scripts.

https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops is a set of helm scripts and other tools that is widely widely used, and there's a lot more like it. It's a huge build out, using convention and a common platform to enable portable knowledge & sharing.

Self hosting did not have intellectual scale out at it's back, before Kubernetes came along. Docker and ansible and others have been around, but theres never been remotely the success there has been today in empowering users to setup & run complex services.

We really have clawed out of the server-hugging jungle &started building some villages. It's wonderful to see.

Going thru this repo https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops

Take a look at my open source GitOps repo managed by Flux here: https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops

Im fully onboard with the geneneral idea as a target.

Right now it's for early early adopters. Hosting stuff is still a painm But we are getting better at hosting stuff, finding stable patterns, paving the path. Hint, it's not doing less, it's not simpler options: it's adopting & making our own industrial scale tooling. https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops is a great early & still strong demonstration; the up front cost od learning is high, but there's the biggest ecosystem of support you can imagine, and once you recognize the patterns, you can get into flow states, make stuff happen, with extreme leverage far beyond where humanity has ever been. Building the empowered individual is happening, and we're using stable good patterns that will mean the individual isnt so off on their own doing ops- they'll have a lot more accrued human experiene at their back, their running of services isnt as simple to understand from the start but goes much much further, is much more mature & well supported in the long run.