Many of the posts I read here are about Docker. Is anybody using Kubernetes to manage their self hosted stuff? For those who’ve tried it and went back to Docker, why?
I’m doing my 3rd rebuild of a K8s cluster after learning things that I’ve done wrong and wanted to start fresh, but when enhancing my Docker setup and deciding between K8s and Docker Swarm, I decided on K8s for the learning opportunities and how it could help me at work.
What’s your story?
Seems a bit overkill for a personal use selfhosting set-up.
Personally, I don’t need anything that requires multiple replicas and loadbalencers.
Do people who have homelabs actually need them? Or is it just for learning?
I find mine useful as both a learning process and as a thing need. I don’t like using cloud services where possible so I can set things up to replace having to rely on those such as next loud for storage, plex and some *arr servers for media etc. And I think once you put the hardware and power costs vs what I’d pay for all the subs (particularly cloud storage costs) it comes out cheaper at least with hardware I’m using.
Yes, those are all great uses of it. But could all still be achieved with docker containers running on some machines at home, right?
Have you ever had a situation where features provided by kubernetes (like replicas, load balancers, etc) came in handy?
I’m not criticizing, I’m genuinely curious if there’s a use-case for kubernetes for personal self-hosting (besides learning).
I was a big proponent of k3s in the homelab, but I’m starting to think otherwise these days. I still expel choice words towards Docker’s networking, but it starts becoming more of a philosophical issue with what the company is doing and whoever decided this kind of networking is nice.
Is the networking on Podman any better? I understand using k8s at home to learn, but what if you don’t care about learning? I have never seen a point to k8s in homelabs other than in home-datacentres, and I’m starting to veer away from k3s too, since I don’t need extreme HA over 3 machines for my services (I would have used Proxmox if I wanted that).
Yeah, could someone give me a primer on how Podman is better than Docker? I’m adamant that I don’t want to use anything with the name “Docker” in my lab.
For me, I find that I learn more effectively when I have a goal. Sure, it’s great to follow somebody’s “Hello World” web site tutorial, but the real learning comes when I start to extend it to include CI/CD for example.
As far as a use case, I’d say that learning IS the use case.
A lot of people thought this was the case for VMs and docker as well, and now it seems to be the norm.
Yes, but docker does provide features that are useful at the level of a hobbyist self-hosting a few services for personal use (e.g. reproducibility). I like using docker and ansible to set up my systems, as I can painlessly reproduce everything or migrate to a different VPS in a few minutes.
But kubernetes seems overkill. None of my services have enough traffic to justify replicas, I’m the only user.
Besides learning (which is a valid reason), I don’t see why one would bother setting it up at home. Unless there’s a very specific use-case I’m missing.