shoe-string-server VS k3s

I have a very similar system[1] for my personal projects, only I use GitHub actions to push a docker image to ECR and a commit to a config repo bumping the tag. I then have a cronjob to pull the config repo and reconcile using docker compose.

I wouldn't use it for serious stuff, but it's been working great for my random personal projects (biggest gap is if something crashes it'll stay crashed until manual intervention currently)

- [1] https://github.com/mnahkies/shoe-string-server/pull/2

For my personal stuff that doesn't get any traffic I cobbled together some scripts to manage containers / SSL here https://github.com/mnahkies/shoe-string-server

I don't think I ever got around to making it self healing if a container dies, but it does support gitops style deployments through a cronjob / conf repo similar to argocd

It's been running happily on a <$10 / month aws lightsail instance for a few years now, though tbh I'd still reach for k8s for anything serious

Interestingly this seems like a pretty popular problem to solve.

I made a similar thing recently as well, although with the goal to handle ingress and monitoring out the box as well, whilst still able to run comfortably on a small box.

I took a fairly similar approach, leveraging docker-compose files, and using a single data directory for ease of backup (although it's on my to-do list to split out conf/data).

If there was a way to get a truly slim and easy to setup k8s compatible environment I'd probably prefer that, but I couldn't find anything that wouldn't eat most of my small servers ram

https://github.com/mnahkies/shoe-string-server if you're interested

Opinionated meaning it picks, install, patches your CNI/Ingress/Load Balancer/DNS Server/Metrics Server/Monitoring Setup.

k3s is probably most well known as it ships with bunch of preinstall software: https://github.com/k3s-io/k3s so you can just start throwing yaml files at cluster and handling workloads. It's what I use for my homelab.

Paid things I've heard of include OpenStack and SideroLabs. Haven't used personally by SRE coworkers say good things about them.

For self-hosting I've found https://k3s.io to be really good from the SUSE people. Works on basically any Linux distro and makes self-hosting k8s not miserable.

Yes it’s going to depend on which k8s distribution you’re using. We have work in-progress for k3s to natively support nix-snapshotter: https://github.com/k3s-io/k3s/pull/9319

For other distributions, nix-snapshotter works with official containerd releases so it’s just a matter of toml configuration and a systemd unit for nix-snapshotter.

We run Kubernetes outside of NixOS, but yes the NixOS modules provided by the nix-snapshotter certainly make it simple.

K3S: is a lightweight distribution of Kubernetes that is designed for resource-constrained environments. It is an excellent option for running Kubernetes on a virtual machine or cloud server.

I recently purchased a used Lenovo M900 Think Centre (i7 with 32GB RAM) from eBay to expand my mini-homelab, which was just a single Synology DS218+ plugged into my ISP's router (yuck!). Since I've been spending a big chunk of time at work playing around with Kubernetes, I figured that I'd put my skills to the test and run a k3s node on the new server. While I was familiar with k3s before starting this project, I'd never actually run it before, opting for tools like kind (and minikube before that) to run small test clusters for my local development work.

Kubernetes - k3s distribution

I’ve created a local cluster with K3S and installing Windmill could not be simpler with just one chart to configure, which already has sane defaults to get started. For this demo we will also configure workers to passthrough environment variables to our scripts so that they have access to the Kubernetes API server for later.

You should be familiar with Kubernetes and have set up a Kubernetes cluster. I recommend k3s.