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!
I agree. k8s and helm have a steep learning curve. I have an engineering background and understand k8s in and out. Therefore, for my helm is the cleanest solution. I would recommend getting to know k8s and it’s resources, before using (or creating) helm charts.
Yeah - I did come down a bit harder on helm charts than perhaps I intended - but starting out with them was a confusing mess for me. Especially since they all create a new ‘custom-to-this-thing’ config file for you to work with rather than ‘standard yml you can google’. The layer of indirection was very confusing when I was learning. Once I abandoned them and realized how simple a basic deployment in k8s really is then I was able to actually make progress.
I’ve deployed half a dozen or so services now and I still don’t think I’d bother with helm for any of it.