talos VS rke2

I think this is underrated as a design flaw for how Linux tends to be used in 2024. At its most benign it's an anachronism and potential source of complexity, as it's worst it's a major source of security flaws and unintended behavior (eg linux multitenancy was designed for two people in the same lab sharing a server, not for running completely untrusted workloads at huge scale).

I haven't had a chance to try it out but this is why I think Talos linux (https://www.talos.dev/) is a step in the right direction for Linux as it is used for cloud/servers. Though personally I think multitenancy esp. regarding containerized applications/cgroups is a bigger problem and I don't know if they're addressing that.

How to create a VM with the Talos image is beyond the scope of this article. Please refer to the official documentation for guidance. After bootstrapping the control plane, the next step is to deploy the Talos CCM along with a CNI plugin.

Maybe in the future I will try others systems, like Talos which is designed for Kubernetes - secure, immutable, and minimal.

I've used Talos Linux[1] on a production infrastructure. To keep a Maintainability. (Because there are no person to maintain a infrastructure 24/7)

All the configurations are made and came from YAML. So I can manage and share on Git. And able to spin a new node (or cluster) ASAP.

For my own, I'm using a NixOS as a daily driver. It's pretty great to spin up machine and environment ASAP. (I don't know why I keep saying `ASAP`, but time is a money.)

However the downside is require a strong knowledge of Nix Language. Sometime the installer crashses.

Without that, it's pretty great.

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[1]: https://www.talos.dev/

Log aggregation: https://reclaim-the-stack.com/docs/platform-components/log-a...

Observability is on the whole better than what we had at Heroku since we now have direct access to realtime resource consumption of all infrastructure parts. We also have infinite log retention which would have been prohibitively expensive using Heroku logging addons (though we cap retention at 12 months for GDPR reasons).

> Who/What is going to be doing that on this new platform and how much does that cost?

Me and my colleague who created the tool together manage infrastructure / OS upgrades and look into issues etc. So far we've been in production 1.5 years on this platform. On average we spent perhaps 3 days per month doing platform related work (mostly software upgrades). The rest we spend on full stack application development.

The hypothesis for migrating to Kubernetes was that the available database operators would be robust enough to automate all common high availability / backup / disaster recovery issues. This has proven to be true, apart from the Redis operator which has been our only pain point from a software point of view so far. We are currently rolling out a replacement approach using our own Kubernetes templates instead of relying on an operator at all for Redis.

> Now you need to maintain k8s, postgresql, elasticsearch, redis, secret managements, OSs, storage... These are complex systems that require people understanding how they internally work

Thanks to Talos Linux (https://www.talos.dev/), maintaining K8s has been a non issue.

TIL about Talos (https://github.com/siderolabs/talos, via your github/onedr0p/cluster-template link). I'd been previously running k3s cluster on a mixture of x86 and ARM (RPi) nodes, and frankly it was a bit of a PiTA to maintain.

About a month ago I setup a Kubernetes cluster using Talos to handle my container load at home.

I considered deploying Talos a few weeks ago, and I ran into this:

https://github.com/siderolabs/talos/issues/8367

Unless I’ve missed something, this isn’t a big deal in an AWS-style cloud where extra storage volumes (EBS, etc) have essentially no incremental cost, and maybe it’s okay on bare metal if the bare metal is explicitly designed with a completely separate boot disk (this includes Raspberry Pi using SD for boot and some other device for actual storage), but it seemed like a mostly showstopping issue for an average server that was specced with the intent to boot off a partition.

I suppose one could fudge it with NVMe namespaces if the hardware cooperates. (I’ve never personally tried setting up a nontrivial namespace setup.)

I assume https://www.talos.dev/

Basically a small OS that will prop itself up and allow you to create/adopt into a Kubernetes cluster. Seems to work well from my experience and pretty easy to get set up on.

First, obligatory xkcd [0].

> This challenge/solution consumed my entire interest for that day. My dopamine hit was because I wouldn't have to do the BigBoringTask ever again.

Yep. Occasionally I have to stop and remind myself that all I'm trying to do is rename 10 files (for example), and by the time I remember the {ba,z}sh-ism for parameter substitution, I could have probably manually renamed them. I usually tell myself that it's not nearly as fun, though.

This does occasionally present detrimental facets, though. I have a homelab, and as most people with one, its primary purpose is storing and serving media files (I promise I do other things too, but let's be honest – Plex is what people care about). I run apps in K3OS, which has been dead for quite some time. The NAS is in a VM under Proxmox, and I build images with Packer + Ansible. I've been wanting to shift K3OS over to Talos [1] for some time, but I had convinced myself that it was only worthwhile if all of it was in IaC, starting from PXE. I got most of the way there, and then stopped due to work taking more of my life than I wanted. Unfortunately, around this time the NAS broke (as in a hardware failure, not a software issue), and I was refusing to bring it back until the entire homelab was up to my absurd self-imposed standards. Eventually I convinced myself this was a ridiculous punishment, replaced the dead hardware, and brought it back.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1319/

[1]: https://www.talos.dev/

In this essay, we showed how to use Rancher rke2 to deploy a Kubernetes cluster with 6 Debian nodes with firewall enabled. We've also covered deploying Cilium as a CNI for our cluster and have it completely replace kube-proxy so as to increase speed and gain more observability via Cilium tools. This article also showed how to deploy Metallb to manage IP pools and load balance traffic for those IP pools. Throughout this guide, we assumed that we have an external load balancer that will distribute traffic to our workload and control plane nodes. For further information please visit rke2 official documents: "https://docs.rke2.io/".

In this blog post, we will demonstrate how easy and fast it is to deploy Sveltos on an RKE2 cluster with the help of ArgoCD, register two RKE2 Cluster API (CAPI) clusters and create a ClusterProfile to deploy Prometheus and Grafana Helm charts down the managed CAPI clusters.

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...

To provision all of my clusters, I use Rancher with RKE2. The primary Rancher server is hosted on a bootstrapped RKE2 cluster running on a VPS.

Golang has burned me more than once with bizarre design decisions that break things in a user hostile way.

The last one we ran into was a change in Go 1.15 where servers that presented a TLS certificate with the hostname encoded into the CN field instead of the more appropriate SAN field always fail validation.

The behavior could be disabled however that functionality was removed in 1.18 with no way to opt back into the old behavior. I understand why SAN is the right way to do it but in this case I didn’t control the server.

Developers at Google probably never have to deal with 3rd parties with shitty infrastructure but a lot of us do.

Here’s a bug in rke that’s related https://github.com/rancher/rke2/issues/775

just looking at this myself. I think k3s has more support for arm, but looking through the github repo there are a lot of bugs indicating its a mess. RKE2 seems to be their big push, they also have a github issue open that has been open for the last 2 releases that they are going to add a update path from k3s to rke2. https://github.com/rancher/rke2/issues/881

RKE (https://rancher.com/docs/rke) and RKE2 (https://docs.rke2.io/) from Rancher folks