Wanting to dip my toes into kubernetes for homelab stuff and I have a few questions.

  1. Do I need a specialized OS for it? I’ve been trying to get some TalOS VMs running but I’ve ran into some issues. Would you recommend like a Ubuntu server running kubernetes over something like TalOS?

  2. Could I run this on a Windows server? I’m personally a Linux guy, but a friend who prefers windows server wanted to try it and I thought I’d ask.

  3. Can I migrate Docker services to a Kube cluster? How easy is it?

  4. Any recommendations for learning materials? I’ve clearly struggled with TalOS’s quick start materials as I haven’t been able to get into the tutorial cluster made with docker locally. I keep getting weird errors and reinstalling Talosctl and docker. I’ve diagnosed this as a “skill issue”. My learning budget is like $100 for a udemy class or good interactive guide (Paid for by work apparently. I was learning this for fun, but it may actually be needed knowledge for a project)

  • deifyed@lemmy.wtfEnglish
    1·
    11 hours ago

    Haven’t gotten around to testing Talos enough, but I’m very enthusiastic about the idea. The little I’ve tested it has been great. My reasoning is (from my point of view ofc): maintaining an OS(Linux/windows/what have you) is pain, maintaining Kubernetes is pain. If I can I want to put all my effort into one of them. The regular OSes are made to do anything, Talos is made for one specific thing which hopefully reduces the attack and maintenance surface a lot. You also get a fair amount of handholding with Talos compared to raw Kubernetes.

    No idea about the windows server part.

    If your docker services is running with docker compose, there’s a tool called https://kompose.io/ that will help you. Haven’t tried it, but as most k8s things it probably need some adjustments.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I9PkvZ80BQ is an alright overview of the idea k8s. This thing called https://k3s.io/ is a nice staying point for testing k8s out

    Not sure if the following will help you, but it helped me so I’ll share:

    • Kubernetes is isn’t specifically designed for running services. It’s a generalized tool to help you implement a declarative pattern for your compute
    • A lot of the hate K8s gets is actually due to the declarative paradigm. There’s still a lot of tasks people don’t consider worthy of describing. In k8s you’re supposed to describe everything

    Edit: k8s is awesome in my unpopular? opinion, but yeah. There is a significant learning curve.

    A lot of the experience for getting a service up and running is boilerplate. You can checkout an old project of mine to see how a small set of information must be structured to work in k8s: https://github.com/deifyed/kaex The output will only work for a old version of k8s. Haven’t kept the project updated due to work moving away from k8s