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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

by zrail 3mo ago

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".

lloydatkinson 2mo ago
Did you ever consider NixOS for your homelab?
- zrail 2mo ago
  I haven't, mostly for personal reasons rather than technical ones.
sierra1011 2mo ago
For transparency, I work with K8s every day and run it with FluxCD as my homelab and have in various formats for a few years. Before that though, I had a single computer (a NUC if memory serves) with systemd running docker containers. Dead simple.
evanphx 2mo ago
The honest answer to your question about where the line is: it's when you start writing your own health checks, restart logic, and deployment orchestration on top of compose. That's the tipping point where you're maintaining infrastructure instead of just running apps. We built Miren for exactly this middle ground. Push to the cluster, it handles image building, TLS, and deployment on any Linux server. No Dockerfile, no compose, no Kubernetes. Autoscaling is on by default. It's not that Kubernetes is wrong, it's that there should be something between compose scripts and a full cluster. We're actively working on ways of deploying already ready services in docker files to the cluster, which would probably be what you're looking for initially unless the cluster you're doing a lot of development on the cluster.
- henryteeare 2mo ago
  Why did you use AI to write this? EDIT: Only moderate snark intended.

by zrail 3mo ago

lloydatkinson 2mo ago

Did you ever consider NixOS for your homelab?

zrail 2mo ago
I haven't, mostly for personal reasons rather than technical ones.

sierra1011 2mo ago

For transparency, I work with K8s every day and run it with FluxCD as my homelab and have in various formats for a few years. Before that though, I had a single computer (a NUC if memory serves) with systemd running docker containers. Dead simple.

evanphx 2mo ago

The honest answer to your question about where the line is: it's when you start writing your own health checks, restart logic, and deployment orchestration on top of compose. That's the tipping point where you're maintaining infrastructure instead of just running apps. We built Miren for exactly this middle ground. Push to the cluster, it handles image building, TLS, and deployment on any Linux server. No Dockerfile, no compose, no Kubernetes. Autoscaling is on by default. It's not that Kubernetes is wrong, it's that there should be something between compose scripts and a full cluster. We're actively working on ways of deploying already ready services in docker files to the cluster, which would probably be what you're looking for initially unless the cluster you're doing a lot of development on the cluster.

henryteeare 2mo ago
Why did you use AI to write this? EDIT: Only moderate snark intended.