So I have rebuilt my Production rack with very little in terms of an actual software plan.

I host mostly docker contained services (Forgejo, Ghost Blog, OpenWebUI, Outline) and I was previously hosting each one in their own Ubuntu Server VM on Proxmox thus defeating the purpose.

So I was going to run a VM on each of these Thinkcentres that worked as a Kubernetes Cluster and then ran everything on that. But that also feels silly since these PCs are already Clustered through Proxmox 9.

I was thinking about using LXC but part of the point of the Kubernetes cluster was to learn a new skill that might be useful in my career and I don’t know how this will work with Cloudflared Tunnels which is my preferred means of exposing services to the internet.

I’m willing to take a class or follow a whole bunch of “how-to” videos, but I’m a little frazzled on my options. Any suggestions are welcome.

  • koala@programming.devEnglish
    3·
    12 hours ago

    I think Cloudflare Tunnels will require a different setup on k8s than on regular Linux hosts, but it’s such a popular service among self-hosters that I have little doubt that you’ll find a workable process.

    (And likely you could cheat, and set up a small Linux VM to “bridge” k8s and Cloudflare Tunnels.)

    Kubernetes is different, but it’s learnable. In my opinion, K8S only comes into its own in a few scenarios:

    • Really elastic workloads. If you have stuff that scales horizontally (uncommon), you really can tell Amazon to give you more Kubernetes nodes when load grows, and destroy the nodes when load goes down. But this is not really applicable for self hosting, IMHO.

    • Really clustered software. Setting up say a PostgreSQL cluster is a ton of work. But people create K8S operators that you feed a declarative configuration (I want so many replicas, I want backups at this rate, etc.) and that work out everything for you… in a way that works in all K8S implementations! This is also very cool, but I suspect that there’s not a lot of this in self-hosting.

    • Building SaaS platforms, etc. This is something that might be more reasonable to do in a self-hosting situation.

    Like the person you’re replying to, I also run Talos (as a VM in Proxmox). It’s pretty cool. But in the end, I only run there 4 apps I’ve written myself, so using K8S as a kind of SaaS… and another application, https://github.com/avaraline/incarnator, which is basically distributed as container images and I was too lazy to deploy in a more conventional way.

    I also do this for learning. Although I’m not a fan of how Docker Compose is becoming dominant in the self-hosting space, I have to admit it makes more sense than K8S for self-hosting. But K8S is cool and might get you a cool job, so by all means play with it- maybe you’ll have fun!