harbormaster VS k3s

I use an HP ProLiant Microserver with four drives in a ZFS RAIDZ array and an SSD for the OS. For software, I mostly run it in Docker using a very small container orchestration program I wrote:

https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster

I needed something that would restart containers automatically when I pushed to a branch, so I wrote a few lines of code to do it:

https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster

As far as PaaSes go, it's probably the simplest, and works really well.

I was in the same boat as you and built something simple that I really like:

https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster

It'll just pull some repos, make sure the containers are up, and make your configuration simple and discoverable. It really works great at that.

I do this for our services, it works great and we can easily put SSO in front of them with CF Access. I publish a Docker container that you can use as a sidecar for your Compose deployments:

https://gitlab.com/stavros/docker-cloudflared

I use this with Harbormaster (https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster) so I can expose containerized stuff without ever forwarding any ports outside of Docker.

I use Dokku for that (I can share my Bitwarden repo if you want, the entire thing is four lines or something). I also made https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster for things that weren't so "web server -> app -> database" and love it.

I had the same problem and didn't want to manage things by hand, so I wrote Harbormaster:

https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster

It basically pulls Compose apps from the git repositories you specify, builds the containers and makes sure they're running. Pretty simple and works really well for me.

(This post should read "Argo tunnel" instead of just "Argo")

I did the same to enable secure access to services via SSO at work. I used Harbormaster[1] to deploy Compose files, but it's otherwise the same setup.

One of the big advantages this has is that the services can't be accessed any other way (not even from the same host, as they only listen inside the Docker network). That makes it hard to forget some port exposed because you listened to 0.0.0.0 instead of localhost.

Cloudflare access is very easy to set up SSO with, as well. I'd recommend this setup if you need it, though for home usage I usually just set up Caddy as a reverse proxy with basic auth, as I'll be the only person using this and I don't want Cloudflare MITMing my personal stuff.

[1]: https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster

Something like harbormaster? https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster

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.