home-k8s VS talos

First, obligatory xkcd [0].

> This challenge/solution consumed my entire interest for that day. My dopamine hit was because I wouldn't have to do the BigBoringTask ever again.

Yep. Occasionally I have to stop and remind myself that all I'm trying to do is rename 10 files (for example), and by the time I remember the {ba,z}sh-ism for parameter substitution, I could have probably manually renamed them. I usually tell myself that it's not nearly as fun, though.

This does occasionally present detrimental facets, though. I have a homelab, and as most people with one, its primary purpose is storing and serving media files (I promise I do other things too, but let's be honest – Plex is what people care about). I run apps in K3OS, which has been dead for quite some time. The NAS is in a VM under Proxmox, and I build images with Packer + Ansible. I've been wanting to shift K3OS over to Talos [1] for some time, but I had convinced myself that it was only worthwhile if all of it was in IaC, starting from PXE. I got most of the way there, and then stopped due to work taking more of my life than I wanted. Unfortunately, around this time the NAS broke (as in a hardware failure, not a software issue), and I was refusing to bring it back until the entire homelab was up to my absurd self-imposed standards. Eventually I convinced myself this was a ridiculous punishment, replaced the dead hardware, and brought it back.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1319/

[1]: https://www.talos.dev/

I had a similar nixos homelab too, but i didn't use k3s and instead used the kubernetes module.

I have since switched to Talos Linux, as the management is more "kubernetes-native" than using NixOS.

Talos Linux: https://www.talos.dev/

Super cool. I always enjoy reading about systems that challenge, well, "ossified" assumptions. An OS not providing a shell, for example? Madness! ... or is it genius, if the OS has a specific purpose...? It's thought-provoking, if nothing else.

I'm a bit skeptical of parts. For instance, the "init" binary being less than 400 lines of golang - wow! And sure, main.go [1] is less than 400 lines and very readable. Then you squint at the list of imported packages, or look to the left at the directory list and realize main.go isn't nearly the entire init binary.

That `talosctl list` invocation [2] didn't escape my notice either. Sure, the base OS may have only a handful of binaries - how many of those traditional utilities have been stuffed into the API server? Not that I disagree with the approach! I think every company eventually replaces direct shell access with a daemon like this. It's just that "binary footprint" can get a bit funny if you have a really sophisticated API server sitting somewhere.

[1]: https://github.com/siderolabs/talos/blob/main/internal/app/m...

[2]: https://www.talos.dev/v1.6/reference/cli/#talosctl-list

Where `kube.cue` sets reasonable defaults (e.g. image is /). The "cluster" runs on a mini PC in my basement, and I have a small Digital Ocean VM with a static IP acting as an ingress (networking via Tailscale). Backups to cloud storage with restic, alerting/monitoring with Prometheus/Grafana, Caddy/Tailscale for local ingress.

[1] https://www.talos.dev/

[2] https://cuelang.org/

Looks somewhat similar to the talos Linux project[1]

[1] https://www.talos.dev/

Talos Linux basically implements their entire userspace in Go and its similar to BottleRocketOS, because it is designed to host Kubernetes.

https://www.talos.dev/

You might be surprised to find that Talos os (linux distro for kubernetes) mostly uses Go: https://github.com/siderolabs/talos

I've been using a 3 nuc (actually Ryzen devices) k3s on SuSE MicroOS https://microos.opensuse.org/ for my homelab for a while, and I really like it. They made some really nice decisions on which parts of k8s to trim down and which Networking / LB / Ingress to use.

The option to use sqlite in place of etcd on an even lighter single node setup makes it super interesting for even lighter weight homelab container environment setups.

I even use it with Longhorn https://longhorn.io/ for shared block storage on the mini cluster.

If anyone uses it with MicroOS, just make sure you switch to kured https://kured.dev/ for the transactional-updates reboot method.

I'd love to compare it against Talos https://www.talos.dev/ but their lack of support for a persistent storage partition (only separate storage device) really hurts most small home / office usage I'd want to try.

If you’re interested in something not AWS check out Talos https://www.talos.dev/

It’s been around longer than Bottlerocket