home-ops VS cert-manager

These are great operational wins. Agreed very much that having autonomic (can fix itself) systems at your back is a massive game changer. De-crustifies the act of running things.

The other win is that there's a substantial cultural base to this way to go. Folks have been doing selfhosting for ages, but everyone has their own boutique setup some their way. A couple tools and techniques could be shared, but mostly everyone took blank slate configs & built their own system up, & added their own monitoring & operational scripts.

https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops is a set of helm scripts and other tools that is widely widely used, and there's a lot more like it. It's a huge build out, using convention and a common platform to enable portable knowledge & sharing.

Self hosting did not have intellectual scale out at it's back, before Kubernetes came along. Docker and ansible and others have been around, but theres never been remotely the success there has been today in empowering users to setup & run complex services.

We really have clawed out of the server-hugging jungle &started building some villages. It's wonderful to see.

Going thru this repo https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops

Take a look at my open source GitOps repo managed by Flux here: https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops

Im fully onboard with the geneneral idea as a target.

Right now it's for early early adopters. Hosting stuff is still a painm But we are getting better at hosting stuff, finding stable patterns, paving the path. Hint, it's not doing less, it's not simpler options: it's adopting & making our own industrial scale tooling. https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops is a great early & still strong demonstration; the up front cost od learning is high, but there's the biggest ecosystem of support you can imagine, and once you recognize the patterns, you can get into flow states, make stuff happen, with extreme leverage far beyond where humanity has ever been. Building the empowered individual is happening, and we're using stable good patterns that will mean the individual isnt so off on their own doing ops- they'll have a lot more accrued human experiene at their back, their running of services isnt as simple to understand from the start but goes much much further, is much more mature & well supported in the long run.

My Kubernetes cluster, deployments, infrastructure provisioning is all available over here on Github.

For example: https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops/pull/4528

I'm running minio in my cluster with NFS backend just fine. You can see my deployment of it here.

cert-manager

The second one is a combination of tools: External DNS, cert-manager, and NGINX ingress. Using these as a stack, you can quickly deploy an application, making it available through a DNS with a TLS without much effort via simple annotations. When I first discovered External DNS, I was amazed at its quality.

On top of its core components, SpinKube depends on cert-manager. cert-Manager is responsible for provisioning and managing TLS certificates that are used by the admission webhook system of the Spin Operator. Let’s install cert-manager and KWasm using the commands shown here:

terraform { required_providers { kubectl = { source = "gavinbunney/kubectl" version = "1.14.0" } } } # The reference to the current project or a AWS project data "google_client_config" "provider" {} # The reference to the current cluster or EKS data "google_container_cluster" "my_cluster" { name = var.cluster_name location = var.cluster_location } # We configure the kubectl provider to use those values for authenticating provider "kubectl" { host = data.google_container_cluster.my_cluster.endpoint token = data.google_client_config.provider.access_token cluster_ca_certificate = base64decode(data.google_container_cluster.my_cluster.master_auth[0].cluster_ca_certificate) } #Download the multiple manifests file. data "http" "cert_manager_crds" { url = "https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v${var.cert_manager_version}/cert-manager.crds.yaml" } data "kubectl_file_documents" "cert_manager_crds" { content = data.http.cert_manager_crds.response_body lifecycle { precondition { condition = 200 == data.http.cert_manager_crds.status_code error_message = "Status code invalid" } } } # We use the for_each or else this kubectl_manifest will only import the first manifest in the file. resource "kubectl_manifest" "cert_manager_crds" { for_each = data.kubectl_file_documents.cert_manager_crds.manifests yaml_body = each.value }

SSL certificates thanks to Cloudflare and cert-manager

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/${CERT_MANAGER_VERSION}/cert-manager.crds.yaml

put the Sub-CA inside hashicorp vault to be used for automatic signing of services like https://cert-manager.io/ inside our k8s clusters.

install-cert-manager: desc: Install cert-manager deps: - init-cluster cmds: - kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/{{.CERT_MANAGER_VERSION}}/cert-manager.yaml - echo "Waiting for cert-manager to be ready" && sleep 25 status: - kubectl -n cert-manager get pods | grep Running | wc -l | grep -q 3

I've been pretty frustrated with how private CAs are supported. Your private root CA can be maliciously used to MITM every domain on the Internet, even though you intend to use it for only a couple domain names. Most people forget to set Name Constraints when they create these and many helper tools lack support [1][2]. Worse, browser support for Name Constraints has been slow [3] and support isn't well tracked [4]. Public CAs give you certificate transparency and you can subscribe to events to detect mis-issuance. Some hosted private CAs like AWS's offer logs [5], but DIY setups don't.

Even still, there are a lot of folks happily using private CAs, they aren't the target audience for this initial release.

[1] https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert/issues/302

[2] https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/issues/3655

[3] https://alexsci.com/blog/name-non-constraint/

[4] https://github.com/Netflix/bettertls/issues/19

[5] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/privateca/latest/userguide/secur...

the Cert Manager