hcloud-cloud-controller-manager VS k3s

When it comes to load balancing, I think the hcloud-cloud-controller-manager[1] is probably your best bet, and although I haven't tested it, I'm sure it can be coerced into some kind of working configuration with the vSwitch/Cloud Network coupling, even none of cluster is actually Cloud-based.

I haven't used Sidero Omni yet, but if it's as well architected as Talos is, I'm sure it's an excellent solution. It still leaves open the question of ordering and provisioning the servers themselves. For simpler use-cases it wouldn't be too difficult to hack together a script to interact with the Hetzner Robot API to achieve this goal, but if I wanted any level of robustness, and if you'll excuse the shameless plug, I think I'd write a custom operator in Rust using my hrobot-rs[2] library :)

[1] https://github.com/hetznercloud/hcloud-cloud-controller-mana...

Did you actually use the Hetzner LBs or did you just send traffic to the NodePort?

It's not even close to major public cloud providers, but this is my setup:

* https://github.com/kube-hetzner/terraform-hcloud-kube-hetzne... (Terraform, Kubernetes bootstrap)

* Flux for CI

* nginx-ingress + Hetzner Loadbalancer (thanks to https://github.com/hetznercloud/hcloud-cloud-controller-mana...)

* Hetzner storage volumes (thanks to https://github.com/hetznercloud/csi-driver)

Kube-Hetzner supports Hetzner Cloud loadbalancers and volumes out of the box, though it also supports other components.

I plan to do the same or have already implemented it. I use the Hetzner private networks with the hcloud-cloud-controller-manager https://github.com/hetznercloud/hcloud-cloud-controller-manager. This creates routes so that the nodes are also connected to each other in the private network. All kubernetes resources listen on the private network. Except for the Kubernetes API, which listens on the external IP of the master so I can use kubectl from home. The actual gateway into the cluster is controlled by a load balancer from Hetzner.

I want to use Hetzner's Load Balancer as a Nginx Ingress controller. I follow this suggestion to install Nginx Ingress via helm.

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.