kubernetes VS Packer

Kubernetes and Helm for deployment

3 .Learn about containerization and orchestration tools such as kubernetes and docker

It is cross-platform and therefore able to be installed on any of Windows / Mac / Linux. This must be one of their advantages. Supposed that some files defining a virtual machine or a pod (of Kubernetes) for grouping ones are delievered, we can develop on the same virtual enviroment with defferent workstations.

Docker is a DevOps containerization service that separates your code from the infrastructure it depends on. Docker is often coupled with Kubernetes, which helps you rapidly deploy, scale and manage your containers. Together, they administer rapid software delivery and take care of its scaling.

Kubernetes is an Open Source container orchestration system. Kubernetes' API provides a uniform control layer for managing containerized services. There is a lot of great material available that explains what Kubernetes is. See Further Reading at the end for some suggestions.

If it's not something you can figure out from kubernetes.io, then its not something that you have to worry about being on the test.

Intermediate knowledge of Flux, Kustomize and K8s

There's been a highly annoying kubectl port-forward heisenbug open for several years which smells an awful lot like one of these dark Go network layer corners. You get a good connection establish and some data flows, but at some random point it decides to drop. It's not annoying enough for any wizards to fix.

https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/74551

Well, like I said, I'm building a harvester/k8s cluster. So, the idea being that if one of the machines is busy or goes down, an other part of the cluster can pick up the slack. Basically, the 'Voltron' of computing, many pcs come together to form a more 'powerful' system. I can do this with any pc, but minis are good for homelabbing because they're cheap, don't take that much space, aren't that power hungry, and they still are powerful enough to run 90% of anything I throw at it, that isn't graphic intensive.

However, I was unable to build the boxes with packer for some reason. It turned out that this wasn't an easy to fix or obvious issue. In fact, I had to search quite hard to find an answer. I am pretty sure my friend Tim Hall (oracle-base) ran into this issue too. Finally, I found a description of the issue on packer GitHub: Packer 1.8.4 not working with Virtualbox 7.0.4+ #12118.

I was building a new version of YugabyteDB vagrant box with packer and virtual box. Because we (Yugabyte) have a new preview release out.

Packer. https://github.com/hashicorp/packer

For an AMI build pipeline, have a look at Hashicorp Packer and Ansible if a host is long lived

Heh, I've been messing more with Nomad & Packer than k8s for my own stuff, I'll say guilty for Ansible though it's useful on its own and with Packer.

Sounds reasonable. Personally, I just try to stay away from k8s until it becomes a requirement. Until then simplest tools are often a good choice for building systems that require less maintenance. That's a per-project decision though.

You do not need Ansible for VMs provisioning - you can bake a VM image that will pull repos and do other preparation stuff. HashiCorp Packer[1] is an good tool for this imo. This applies to bare metal, too, as you can bake ISO or IMG the same way. Stuff that differentiate those systems can be set up with cloud-init or something similar.

Regarding Ansible, it didn't changed much over the years. At least nothing really major like statefulness.

[1] https://www.packer.io/

Oooh, maybe I'll try it with packer or Foreman (or MaaS, I'm actually setting up MaaS atm...)

An AMI (Amazon Machine Image) contains the OS used by an EC2 instance. Normally you'd use a tool such as [Packer](https://www.packer.io/) to build the image. Ansible can be used as a [provisioner](https://www.packer.io/plugins/provisioners/ansible/ansible) for Packer. I usually just use bash scripts.

Note: Some might argue that learning something like Puppet or Ansible is needed. However, the way the cloud works nowadays and with virtualization and orchestration (Kubernetes) both of these technologies (Puppet/Ansible) are losing their relevance/usage. Not to mention both of these are fairly convoluted tools with really pedantic naming and folder structures that over-complicates most processes needlessly. I would 100% recommend learning Terraform and something like Packer if you need to generate machine/VM images. You _could_ feed Ansible into packer if you so-desired, but I think this is silly when a simple shell script would do the trick. Ansible and Puppet are more-ideal for static infrastructure, not in a ephemeral world of Kubernetes.