Rebuilding My Homelab with Compose, Ruby, IPv6, and No Kubernetes

Lot of kubernetes hate here, which is surprising. I run a little 3 node cluster and besides the hardware issues I had (long story), it has been rock solid and dead easy to setup.

Talos + longhorn + fluxcd (optional), is super nice. And everything beyond that is additive and just works within the ecosystem.

If anything, it helped keep my stuff alive during all the hardware issues a lot longer.

I think like 5-6 years ago, kubernetes on baremetal was pretty painful. People should really give it another try, an LLM can probably set it up for you and fire off the docker compose to manifests in one shot. Or just follow the docs yourself, maybe a dozen commands to get a cluster running?

All the enterprisey stuff makes it feel a lot more complex than it really is.

Hey, author here. This is a piece about moving away from kubernetes and toward something that I can actually maintain as a solo person who has a life outside of k9s. It's not really intended to be "anti-kubernetes", more like "kubernetes really is too hard for my purposes".

IMO the best change that I've made has been to give deterministic IPv6 addresses to every container and then using those for ingress.

I'm curious to hear where y'all think the line is between docker compose with Ruby glue and "Dear friend, you have built a Kubernetes".

> Kubernetes is Too Hard. I built a system that I didn't actually know how to maintain without the time or energy necessary to dig myself out of trouble.

Couldn't agree more. Unless your homelab's point is to learn Kubernetes, just keep it simple. Proxmox sounds good, or just QEMU, libvirt, lxc, Docker, podman, whatever. Install packages, not containers where possible. Shell scripts are fine where needed. If it works for you, that's it, end of discussion, don't spend time on "pretty" if it's not the thing you want to get into / enjoy / learn.

(My "thing" is networking, I can assure you my homenet is beautiful. Couldn't give a rat's ass how & where my paperless is running tho. It runs. Done.)

You might like https://uncloud.run/

Meanwhile I’m busy moving the other direction. More K8S.

Main motivation is that I’ve got a lot of compute and memory but it’s spread across many smaller devices. Meaningfully leveraging that requires a way to coordinate…

I do also have a classic Proxmox setup too though so can decide whether something should live in VM/LXC or k8s

IMO, kubernetes is overkill for a small non-homogeneous home cluster.

What I use and really recommend is using systemd +/- docker. It just becomes so darn simple. Do not go the compose route (that route is filled with sadness of the incomplete stacks because db container failed silently kind) - instead aim to decompose the compose files and write a separate systemd service file for each of them, you can then assign limits separately.

I don't want to set anyone on the path ... but I use NixOs and this is so easy to do there.

Most of the stuff hyperscalers use have no place in homelabs, unless you're training for a job application.

So duh.

I still don't know really what Kubernetes is for or why so many people outside specific environments are using it, but it's cool that you're using Ruby.

I did the same move as you away from k8s to plain proxmox containers and VMs. Professionally i do work with k8s, and see the benefits of it (not always, but i see the use cases), but in my homelab it was consuming a lot of energy. Just dropping the whole k8s, made me save 1 kw energy when idle... I guess mainly because of the active API, shifting workload from different workloads and the whole machinery that happens behind the scenes..

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