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?
I think the biggest reasons for me have been growth and professional development. I started my home cluster 8 years ago as a single node of basically just running the hack/ scripts on my Linux desktop. I’ve been able to grow that same cluster to 6 hosts as I’ve replaced desktops and as I got a bit into the used enterprise server scene. I’ve replaced multiple routers and moved behind cloudflare, added a private CA a few times, added solid persistence with rook+ceph, and built my ideal telemetry stack, added velero backups into Backblaze b2, and probably a lot more I’m not thinking of.
That whole time, I’ve had to do almost zero maintenance or upgrades on the side projects I’ve built over the years, or on the self hosted services I’ve run. If you ignore the day or so a year I’ve spent cursing my propensity to upgrade a tad too early and hit snags, though I’ve just about always been able to resolve them pretty quickly and have learned even more from those times.
And on top of that, I get to take a lot of that expertise to work where it happens to pay quite well. And I’ve spent some time working towards building the knowledge into a side gig. Maybe someday that’ll pay the bills too.
One line from your comment struck a chord. The part about maintenance and upgrades. I feel like I get stuff set up and working and go about my life and then a failure happens at the most inopportune moment. Mostly, the failures are when I have a few hours free and decide to upgrade the OS and everything breaks and all the dependencies fall apart and some feature is no longer supported. That’s where I started looking to K8s to just roll back until I have time to manage it.