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A couple of years ago, I was dabbling in the cloud at AWS, and I initially decided to run a MediaWiki server with its associated stack, such as MariaDB and Apac

A couple of years ago, I was dabbling in the cloud at AWS, and I initially decided to run a MediaWiki server with its associated stack, such as MariaDB and Apache or something, on Debian. And I found a good Bitnami AMI to do it with. But what I really wanted to do was to spin up Kubernetes and learn about microservices in some way. The techie guys I polled said I wouldn't need k8s at all for my use case and I should scrap trying to do k8s because it wouldn't do me any good. I'm still sort of miffed at that; I would've rather learned some Kubernetes in the first place rather than just become a petty sysadmin again, so a replacement project that actually did make use of k8s would've been helpful. Anyway I chose to double down on my chosen career in the education industry, so I'm letting my sysadmin/DevOps skills lie fallow until retirement.

n_ary 3y ago
Honestly, getting started with k8s is easy. Get started with minikube on local desktop. Once you get the feel for it, try configuring a multi-node cluster using k3s on DigitalOcean or Hetzner and eventually using managed AKS/EKS/GKE if you feel the need.
- fahhem 3y ago
  I was surprised when I setup k3d the first time, I had a multi-node cluster on my (4 year old) desktop and was able to deploy a multi-node service I wanted to test out without any problems. I would highly recommend k3d if you don't want to pay for cloud servers and don't actually need either high-availability or the CPU power of 3 servers. Also, your desktop is probably more powerful than any base-tier server.
  - timcambrant 3y ago
    What do you use for load balancing and ingress? Do you rely on service discovery in this setup? I always get stuck figuring out how to get traffic into the cluster properly while allowing for graceful fault tolerance. I’ve had success with MetalLB to dynamically announce a single IP for the ingress controller but that feels a bit overkill for a simple lab setup.
    - fahhem 3y ago
      Are you asking about my "clusters" or k3d? For my clusters, they're all single-node and therefore not fault-tolerant clusters, so I don't worry about graceful fault tolerance. I just use nginx-ingress which opens a port on the node (via iptables, so don't expect `lsof` to help!). Then my router port-forwards so my home IP:80 eventually hits my NUC
namaria 3y ago
I'm interested in Kubernetes the same way I'm interested in Erlang. I find distributed systems so much fun to reason about, and trying to understand certain implementation details and design choices shed a light on the reasoning of very smart people on very hard problems. Now, would I want to deal with those technologies all day? Not really. I also like diesel electric locomotives, but I don't wanna run a fleet of them or run through their maintenance sheets.

n_ary 3y ago

Honestly, getting started with k8s is easy. Get started with minikube on local desktop. Once you get the feel for it, try configuring a multi-node cluster using k3s on DigitalOcean or Hetzner and eventually using managed AKS/EKS/GKE if you feel the need.

fahhem 3y ago
I was surprised when I setup k3d the first time, I had a multi-node cluster on my (4 year old) desktop and was able to deploy a multi-node service I wanted to test out without any problems. I would highly recommend k3d if you don't want to pay for cloud servers and don't actually need either high-availability or the CPU power of 3 servers. Also, your desktop is probably more powerful than any base-tier server.
- timcambrant 3y ago
  What do you use for load balancing and ingress? Do you rely on service discovery in this setup? I always get stuck figuring out how to get traffic into the cluster properly while allowing for graceful fault tolerance. I’ve had success with MetalLB to dynamically announce a single IP for the ingress controller but that feels a bit overkill for a simple lab setup.
  - fahhem 3y ago
    Are you asking about my "clusters" or k3d? For my clusters, they're all single-node and therefore not fault-tolerant clusters, so I don't worry about graceful fault tolerance. I just use nginx-ingress which opens a port on the node (via iptables, so don't expect `lsof` to help!). Then my router port-forwards so my home IP:80 eventually hits my NUC

namaria 3y ago

I'm interested in Kubernetes the same way I'm interested in Erlang. I find distributed systems so much fun to reason about, and trying to understand certain implementation details and design choices shed a light on the reasoning of very smart people on very hard problems. Now, would I want to deal with those technologies all day? Not really. I also like diesel electric locomotives, but I don't wanna run a fleet of them or run through their maintenance sheets.