Hey! I have been using Ansible to deploy Dockers for a few services on my Raspberry Pi for a while now and it’s working great, but I want to learn MOAR and I need help…

Recently, I’ve been considering migrating to bare metal K3S for a few reasons:

• To learn and actually practice K8S.
• To have redundancy and to try HA.
• My RPi are all already running on MicroOS, so it kind of make sense to me to try other SUSE stuff (?)
• Maybe eventually being able to manage my two separated servers locations with a neat k3s + Tailscale setup!

Here is my problem: I don’t understand how things are supposed to be done. All the examples I find feel wrong. More specifically:

• Am I really supposed to have a collection of small yaml files for everything, that I use with kubectl apply -f ?? It feels wrong and way too “by hand”! Is there a more scripted way to do it? Should I stay with everything in Ansible ??
• I see little to no example on how to deploy the service containers I want (pihole, navidrome, etc.) to a cluster, unlike docker-compose examples that can be found everywhere. Am I looking for the wrong thing?
• Even official doc seems broken. Am I really supposed to run many helm commands (some of them how just fails) and try and get ssl certs just to have Rancher and its dashboard ?!

I feel that having a K3S + Traefik + Longhorn + Rancher on MicroOS should be straightforward, but it’s really not.

It’s very much a noob question, but I really want to understand what I am doing wrong. I’m really looking for advice and especially configuration examples that I could try to copy, use and modify!

Thanks in advance,

Cheers!