democratic-csi VS k3s

The interface software regarding is not a worry of mine, as democratic-csi does the storage management for me, thus the compatibility it is not limited to the application using the storage per se, as this is handled by Kubernete's CSI drivers, being application-agnostic when utilizing the storage provided.My main worry is not latency, but rather RAM

Check out https://github.com/democratic-csi/democratic-csi

in k3s, i'm using https://github.com/democratic-csi/democratic-csi (was using iSCSI before, now everything is NFS)

Have you checked this out? GitHub democratic-csi I have yet to test this in my @home K8s cluster. It supports iSCSI volume management for FreeNAS, Synology and other CSI backends.

If you ever migrate from docker up to kubernetes, then take a look into democratic-csi. For a modest homelab, it is a valid option (said from somebody who manages a small homelab and plays around with kubernetes).

For persistent storage have you looked into using TrueNAS with a CSI provider with your container orchestrator? I'm assuming your orchestrator is Nomad or Kubernetes.

Yes, Rancher does support FreeNAS, TrueNAS. and Scale using the storage class provider https://github.com/democratic-csi/democratic-csi It's important to remember Rancher is the server. And in this case, you need to ask the question does the k8s cluster that Rancher is managing support this storage class provider? If you are using RKE the answer is Yes.

I use https://github.com/democratic-csi/democratic-csi to mount nfs/iscsi shares (and manage the shares) from my SAN (truenas box).

iSCSI with democratic-csi (https://github.com/democratic-csi/democratic-csi) works great for me on truenas. I use iSCSI for any PVs that don't need to be shared and NFS for anything I'd like to share between different pods (like movies, music).

Storage - democratic-csi looked the most promising, it has worked well so far. I am using zfs-generic-iscsi against an Ubuntu 20.04 storage server. I also tried zfs-generic-nfs and it worked successfully with the caveat of having to deal with NFS file permissions.

Opinionated meaning it picks, install, patches your CNI/Ingress/Load Balancer/DNS Server/Metrics Server/Monitoring Setup.

k3s is probably most well known as it ships with bunch of preinstall software: https://github.com/k3s-io/k3s so you can just start throwing yaml files at cluster and handling workloads. It's what I use for my homelab.

Paid things I've heard of include OpenStack and SideroLabs. Haven't used personally by SRE coworkers say good things about them.

For self-hosting I've found https://k3s.io to be really good from the SUSE people. Works on basically any Linux distro and makes self-hosting k8s not miserable.

Yes it’s going to depend on which k8s distribution you’re using. We have work in-progress for k3s to natively support nix-snapshotter: https://github.com/k3s-io/k3s/pull/9319

For other distributions, nix-snapshotter works with official containerd releases so it’s just a matter of toml configuration and a systemd unit for nix-snapshotter.

We run Kubernetes outside of NixOS, but yes the NixOS modules provided by the nix-snapshotter certainly make it simple.

K3S: is a lightweight distribution of Kubernetes that is designed for resource-constrained environments. It is an excellent option for running Kubernetes on a virtual machine or cloud server.

I recently purchased a used Lenovo M900 Think Centre (i7 with 32GB RAM) from eBay to expand my mini-homelab, which was just a single Synology DS218+ plugged into my ISP's router (yuck!). Since I've been spending a big chunk of time at work playing around with Kubernetes, I figured that I'd put my skills to the test and run a k3s node on the new server. While I was familiar with k3s before starting this project, I'd never actually run it before, opting for tools like kind (and minikube before that) to run small test clusters for my local development work.

Kubernetes - k3s distribution

I’ve created a local cluster with K3S and installing Windmill could not be simpler with just one chart to configure, which already has sane defaults to get started. For this demo we will also configure workers to passthrough environment variables to our scripts so that they have access to the Kubernetes API server for later.

You should be familiar with Kubernetes and have set up a Kubernetes cluster. I recommend k3s.