cluster-template VS loki

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

Grafana Loki is basically like Prometheus, but for logs. It is a horizontally-scalable, highly-available, multi-tenant log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus. It is designed to store and query logs from multiple sources, making it ideal for use in microservices architectures.

We intend to support a wide variety of destinations. Syslog and Loki are currently under development and are expected to be released in the coming weeks. If you would like your favorite tools to be supported as a destination, vote on this Github discussion!

Loki is a log collation tool from the Grafana family of observability solutions. It aggregates, groups, and labels logs from your applications, helping you troubleshoot problems and monitor activity. Although Loki is a general-purpose tool, it's well-suited to Kubernetes and comes with several Kubernetes-specific features. It automatically scrapes and indexes metadata from your Kubernetes workload objects, such as Pod labels, to accompany your Pod logs.

It's like Prometheus, but for logs. Okay it's not really to do with the Norse or Greek gods, instead Loki is a horizontally-scalable, highly-available, multi-tenant log aggregation system inspired by the open source project Prometheus. Built by Grafana Labs, Loki is designed for ease of use. Instead of indexing the contents of the logs, Loki provides a set of labels for each log stream. The latest update includes query acceleration with Bloom filters, native OTel support, Helm charts, and more. Check out the changelog for all the major changes and deprecations.

I also needed to make a small patch to Promtail to make this work: https://github.com/grafana/loki/pull/10256

We don't pull logs, we forward logs to a centralized logging service.

Over the past few months, I've been spending a lot of time creating dashboards on Grafana using Loki for MyUnisoft (the company I work for).