Hi all, I've been venturing for months in this amazing self-hosted hobby and for the last couple of days I'm reading and trying to understand kubernetes a bit more, I've followed this article :
that helps you set up the lightweight Kubernetes version (K3s) and use Portainer as your management dashboard, and it works flawlessly, as you guys can see I'm just using two nodes at the moment.
And I'm using "helm" to install packages and the site ArtifactHUB to get ready to use repository to add into portainer Helm section (still in beta) but works flawlessly, I've installed some packages and the apps works just as I expected, but there's seem to be a shortage of ready to use repository as it's the case with docker alone, like with Plex the only way I got plex running in K3s is with KubeSail with offers an unofficial apps section that includes plex and tons of other well known apps, but strangely enough there are labeled unofficial but still works perfect when installed, but portainer would label all apps installed from KubeSail as external.
Now I think I get the use of kubernetes, it's to have several nodes to use as recourses for your apps and also like a load balance if one node fails your services/apps can keep on running? (like raid for harddisks?)
All tough it was fun learning atleast the basic of Kubernetes with my two nodes, is it really necessary to go full blown out with only kubernetes? Or is Docker just fine for the majority of us homelad self hosted folks?
And is what I'm learning here the same in enterprise environments? Atleast the basics?
I have maintained my web sites, mail servers, family cloud, home media center, backup solution and a few other services for over 20 years.
My configuration is quite stable, and I appreciate maintaining by hand, tight-knitted, the links between all services, so as to make it easier to make the configurations and services slowly evolve over time (migrating from sendmail to postfix, httpd to apache to ngnix, owncloud to nextcloud, cvs to git, etc).
I wouldn't recommend the extra sophistication of containers and orchestration of services for this type of usage, which is very stable and meant to slowly evolve to stay current. Those extras layers are meant to serve fast-evolving environments with frequent updates, continuous delivery, and multiple maintainers. They'd be a burden for my usage.
However, if you plan to use your home server to learn and acquire new skills you want to put on your resume, then it's definitely worth the effort.