Portainer VS rancher

> Any tips on the minimum hardware or VPS's needed to get a small swarm cluster setup?

From my testing, Docker Swarm is very lightweight, uses less memory than both Hashicorp Nomad and lightweight Kubernetes distros (like K3s). Most of the resource requirements will depend on what containers you actually want to run on the nodes.

You might build a cluster from a bunch of Raspberry Pis, some old OptiPlex boxes or laptops, or whatever you have laying around and it's mostly going to be okay. On a practical level, anything with 1-2 CPU cores and 4 GB of RAM will be okay for running any actually useful software, like a web server/reverse proxy, some databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL/MariaDB), as well as either something for a back end or some pre-packaged software, like Nextcloud.

So, even 5$/month VPSes are more than suitable, even from some of the more cheap hosts like Hetzner or Contabo (though the latter has a bad rep for limited/no support).

That said, you might also want to look at something like Portainer for a nice web based UI, for administering the cluster more easily, it really helps with discoverability and also gives you redeploy web hooks, to make CI easier: https://www.portainer.io/ (works for both Docker Swarm as well as Kubernetes, except the Kubernetes ingress control was a little bit clunky with Traefik instead of Nginx)

In this section, we will add Portainer to help us in managing our Docker containers. You can find more details about it here. To integrate Portainer into our EC2 project, we can follow these steps:

Git issues pointing to: https://docs.portainer.io/v/ce-2.9/start/install/agent/swarm/linux gives a ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS.

I am currently running Portainer, but webhooks (GitOps) appear to be broken ( [2.19.0] GitOps Updates not automatically polling from git · Issue #10309 · portainer/portainer · GitHub ) and so I cannot send webhook to redeploy a stack. So, looking for alternatives. Using this as a good excuse to learn more about docker and CI/CD etc.

A Synology NAS running Portainer (https://www.portainer.io/) running Paperless NGX (https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx)

This works better than I can possibly tell you.

I have an Epson WorkForce ES-580W that I bought when my mother passed away to bulk scan documents and it scans everything, double-sided if required, multi-page PDFs if required, at very high speed and uploads everything to OneDrive, at which point I drag and drop everything into Paperless.

I could, thinking about it, have the scanner email stuff to Paperless. Might investigate that today.

Paperless will OCR it and make it all searchable. This setup is amazing, I love living in the future.

> I've come to the conclusion (after trying kops, kubespray, kubeadm, kubeone, GKE, EKS) that if you're looking for < 100 node cluster, docker swarm should suffice. Easier to setup, maintain and upgrade.

Personally, I'd also consider throwing Portainer in there, which gives you both a nice way to interact with the cluster, as well as things like webhooks: https://www.portainer.io/

With something like Apache, Nginx, Caddy or something else acting as your "ingress" (taking care of TLS, reverse proxy, headers, rate limits, sometimes mTLS etc.) it's a surprisingly simple setup, at least for simple architectures.

casaos it just makes things like backups, offsite syncing and many other nas related things so much easier to manage. And gives you a proper nas like experience similar to that in which you'd fine on companies like tnas or synology. I actually also use it as a replacement for portainer when i don't need the more advanced features it offers

> I moved to docker swarm and love it. It's so much easier, straight forward, automatic ingress network and failover were all working out of the box. I'll stay with swarm for now.

I've had decent luck in the past with the K3s distribution, which is a bit cut down Kubernetes: https://k3s.io/

It also integrates nicely with Portainer (aside from occasional Traefik ingress weirdness sometimes), which I already use for Swarm and would suggest to anyone that wants a nice web based UI: https://www.portainer.io/

Others might also mention K0s, MicroK8s or others - there's lots of options there. But even so, I still run Docker Swarm for most of my private stuff as well and it's a breeze.

For my needs, it has just the right amount of abstractions: stacks with services that use networks and can have some storage in the form of volumes or bind mounts. Configuration in the form of environment variables and/or mounted files (or secrets), some deployment constraints and dependencies sometimes, some health checks and restart policies, as well as resource limits.

If I need a mail server, then I just have a container that binds to the ports (even low port numbers) that I need and configure it. If I need a web server, then I can just run Apache/Nginx/Caddy and use more or less 1:1 configuration files that I'd use when setting up either outside of containers, but with the added benefit of being able to refer to other apps by their service names (or aliases, if they have underscores in the names, which sometimes isn't liked).

At a certain scale, it's dead simple to use - no need for PVs and PVCs, no need for Ingress and Service abstractions, or lots and lots of templating that Helm charts would have (although those are nice in other ways).

The control panel is called Homepage. I like it more than Heimdall. To manage Docker I use Portainer.

Did something happen to the Apache 2 rancher? https://github.com/rancher/rancher/blob/v2.7.5/LICENSE RKE2 is similarly Apache 2: https://github.com/rancher/rke2/blob/v1.26.7%2Brke2r1/LICENS...

I follow the 4 ABCD steps bellow, but the first pod deployment never ends. What's wrong in it? Logs and result screens are at the end. Detailed configuration can be found here.

CVE-2023-22651 is rated 9.9/10 : https://github.com/rancher/rancher/security/advisories/GHSA-6m9f-pj6w-w87g

Depends. When I came into my last company I immediately noticed the lack of reproducible environments. Brought this up a few times and was met with some resistance because "we didn't have the capacity"... Until prod went down and it took us 23 hours to bring it back up due to spaghetti terraform.

For the latest releases of rancher: https://github.com/rancher/rancher/releases When is Rancher 2.7.1 going to be released? The Rancher support matrix for 2.7.1 shows k8s v1.24.6 as the highest supported version and Azure will drop AKS v1.24 in a few months... Should this be a concern for us? What could happen if we create our cluster with Rancher for an unsupported K8s version? 1.25 for example. - Rancher 2.7.2 just got released including support for 1.25. I have however tested running unsupported versions before, unless there is major deprecations in the kubernetes API it is fine in my experience. If we move to AKS imported clusters, in case we add node pools, and upgrade the cluster, will those changes be reflected in the Rancher Platform? - Yep! If we face some issues by running an unsupported K8s version on Rancher Launched K8s clusters, is it possible to remove it from Rancher, do the stuff we need, and then import it into the platform? - Yes, however be careful and do testing before doing in prod. From top of mind: Remove cluster from rancher (if imported), if rancher created you might want to revoke ranchers SA key for the cluster first (so it can't remove it). Delete the cattle-system namespace, and any other cattle-* namespaces you don't want to keep. And do your thing. It looks like AKS is faster than Rancher regarding supported Kubernetes versions... We would like to know if Rancher will always be on track with AKS regarding the removal of K8s version support and new versions. - In my experience yes. (Been using rancher on all three clouds for a 4 years now). What are exactly the big differences between imported AKS and Rancher-launched AKS? What should we look at, and what issues can we face when using one or another? - The main difference is that rancher will not be able to upgrade the cluster for you. You will have to do that yourself.

variable "rancher" { type = object({ namespace = string version = string branch = string chart_set = list(object({ name = string value = string })) }) default = { namespace = "cattle-system" # There is a bug with destroying the cloud credentials in version 2.6.9 until 2.7.1 and will be fixed in next release 2.7.2. # See https://github.com/rancher/rancher/issues/39300 version = "2.7.0" branch = "stable" chart_set = [ { name = "replicas" value = 3 }, { name = "ingress.ingressClassName" value = "nginx-external" }, { name = "ingress.tls.source" value = "rancher" }, # There is a bug with the uninstallation of Rancher due to missing priorityClassName of rancher-webhook # The priorityClassName need to be set # See https://github.com/rancher/rancher/issues/40935 { name = "priorityClassName" value = "system-node-critical" } ] } description = "Rancher Helm chart properties." }

When I searched DuckDuckGo instead, the 12th link actually had the real answer. It's in this issue on Rancher's GitHub. Turns out the Rancher admin needs to be in all of the Keycloak groups they want to have show up in the auto-populated picklist in Rancher. Being a Keycloak admin and even creating the groups isn't good enough. Frustratingly, the "caveat" note the Rancher guy is pointing to that says this is only present in the guide to setting up Keycloak for SAML, but apparently this is also true for OIDC.

Explicitly set TLS 1.3 in Rancher, though it could be a bug in Rancher: https://github.com/rancher/rancher/issues/35654

Thanks. Yeah looks like this might work: https://github.com/rancher/rancher/releases/tag/v2.7.2-rc3