longhorn VS metallb

For my primary CSI provider, I use Longhorn, and to administrate my clusters, I use the Kubernetes Dashboard. In front of all of my private dashboards, I use Traefik Forward Auth to limit who can access them.

Maybe with https://longhorn.io

For data must be protected, I use Longhorn https://longhorn.io/ which is basically iSCSI/NFS with replication.

Backups are definitely necessary. The problem though is that you cant detect by default if you are backing up corrupted data. By now i found three approaches: 1. Use a filesystem that detects and fixes errors (e. g. btrfs or zfs) 2. Use par2 (parchive) to generate checksums on your files manually 3. I found the following issue on the k8s storage solution I currently use: https://github.com/longhorn/longhorn/issues/3198 For now I am waiting for option 3 getting merged. In the long run I will upgrade my laptop to btrfs and for now use par2. Hope that provides a starting point. Feel free to add your ideas!

You can use the Longhorn iSCSI installer script as an example. https://github.com/longhorn/longhorn/blob/master/deploy/prerequisite/longhorn-iscsi-installation.yaml

Rancher's Longhorn (even though it's only a single-node)

Application storage now: yes, NAS is probably the best way to go about it. I believe k3s uses some kind of "local storage" by default but there's plenty of alternative Container Storage Interfaces (CSI) out there. Longhorn worked well for me and it covers most uses cases I care about: snapshots, backups, and replication. I don't know about any "NAS providers" though, and once again there will be performance drawbacks with having your storage that externalized.

For me longhorn works really well as my storage backend.

Longhorn is a lightweight, reliable, and powerful distributed block storage system for Kubernetes.

You mentioned storage... That's always tricky but provisioning persistent volumes with https://longhorn.io is really simple... It's also easy to setup, the helm chart is wonderful

MetalLB

Set up MetalLB https://metallb.universe.tf/ either via helm or simple manifest. Pick a range of ips to allocate, and assign via manifest https://metallb.universe.tf/configuration/

metalLB to manage bare-metal LoadBalancer services - WIP - Only L2 configuration can be set-up via playbook.

-- MetalLB

Heads up: breaking changes in 0.13.2

I gave it a quick try with the snippet bellow and their sample configMap in https://github.com/metallb/metallb/tree/main/configmaptocrs and it does not work. Would've been nice, if the additional configMap definition would be optional. But well..

You might want to try a IPAddressPool and a L2Advertisement. The configMap has been deprecated with MetaLB 0.13 (see https://github.com/metallb/metallb/issues/1473 - you'll find my name there in the discussion and PRs as well)