k3os VS Ansible

I still don't forgive SUSE for buying Rancher and then unceremoniously killing k3os. They just left the website up and everything, made no announcement, made no attempt to help the community take over, just left the Github repo to rot: https://k3os.io/

Hard to have confidence in SUSE's commitment to another open source operating system side project after that. SUSE's announcement at the time:

Like SUSE, Rancher is 100% open source and equally as passionate as SUSE about true open source innovation, community empowerment, and customer success. SUSE and Rancher share the same goal – happy and satisfied customers.

https://www.suse.com/c/suse-acquires-rancher/

k3os is no longer supported by Rancher: https://github.com/rancher/k3os/issues/846 I've been keeping mine up to date with https://github.com/BlueKrypto/k3os

[0] https://docs.k3s.io/installation/ha-embedded [1] https://k3os.io/

I (still) run k3os, but it's dead since SUSE bought rancher. (see https://github.com/rancher/k3os/issues/846)

virt-install --install \ --memory 2048 \ --os-type linux \ --os-variant ubuntu20.04 \ --disk size=20 \ --graphics=none \ --name k3os \ kernel=https://github.com/rancher/k3os/releases/download/v0.21.5-k3s2r1/k3os-vmlinuz-amd64,initrd=https://github.com/rancher/k3os/releases/download/v0.21.5-k3s2r1/k3os-initrd-amd64,kernel_args='k3os.fallback_mode=install k3os.install.iso_url=https://github.com/rancher/k3os/releases/download/v0.21.5-k3s2r1/k3os-amd64.iso k3os.install.silent=true k3os.install.tty=ttyS0 console=ttyS0 k3os.install.device=/dev/vda k3os.password=hunter2'

I'm personally fond of https://k3os.io for my small to medium hobby and professional clusters. It comes with a lot the bells and whistles, but is also pretty minimum and just scales easily.

I really liked K3OS, but I feel like Rancher is no longer supporting it. The last commit on the k3os repo is from April, and before those three commits, November of last year. When Rancher decided to move their HCI offering, Harvester, over to RancherOS V2 being based on cOS toolkit/OpenSuse, I don't have high hopes that K3OS will be maintained.

I run k3os on an old laptop with a broken screen.

Ansible is an open-source IT automation tool that simplifies application deployment, cloud provisioning, and configuration management across diverse environments. It uses a declarative language to describe the desired state of the system, and then takes the necessary actions to achieve that state. Ansible has become incredibly popular due to its simplicity, agentless architecture, and extensive community support. Document: ansible.com, ansible basics

Ansible v2.16

Ansible is a tool used to help manage software automation processes, configuration management across machines, deployment as well as remote execution of commands and scripts. In sports, Ansible operates as the coach of your team by providing strategies (playbooks), and actions, and ensuring the smooth execution of tasks across your infrastructure, just like a coach guides and directs players (Servers)during a game.

They support for-if from python, too: https://jinja.palletsprojects.com/en/3.1.x/templates/#loop-f... but I haven't tried the "recursive" keyword to know if ansible supports that. I say "ansible supports that" because they don't just drop jinja2 into ansible and call it a draw, they have a bunch of custom execution integrations: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v2.16.3/lib/ansible/...

To manage a VM, you can use something as simple as just manual actions over SSH, or can use tools like Ansible, Hashicorp's Packer and Terraform or other automations. For an app where there is minimal load and security/reliability concern, VMs are still a great option that provide a lot of value for the buck

In this article's context, it is simply a tool that provides a declarative way to automate your machine/OS to configure the development machine as you want (install package, modify the configuration, etc). Examples of these tools are Ansible, Puppet, etc.

Now we're getting more tangential, but for years, Ansible releases were named for Van Halen songs (see old Changelog here: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v1.8.4/CHANGELOG.md)

In the lab to follow, we'll quickly provision a 3-node kubeadm cluster (1 master, 2 workers) on the cloud provider of your choice using an automation stack comprised of OpenTofu and Ansible, then deploy Rook Ceph using the official Helm charts and confirm that we are now able to successfully create CSI volume snapshots from PVCs by reusing the MinIO example from our last article.