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Highly available Kubernetes with batteries for small business

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Re: Highly available Kubernetes with batteries for small business

#11

Post by solotronics »

CSDude wrote: post #5

It feels like a huge hassle for a small business. Use a cloud, it's not that expensive. If, not even using a cloud is an option, you can still mount NFS, use a bridged network and use DHCP from that router, and run your software in systemd/upstart or simple Docker containers. I don't like to sound like a grumpy old man that yells at new tech, I'm all good for experimentation home setups involving these, but every com…

For someone who is interested and capable the costs are an order of magnitude lower for self hosting. Your right for the most part small business would be better off using an existing cloud, they dont have the skillset to properly design and manage something like this themselves.

Re: Highly available Kubernetes with batteries for small business

#13

Post by alephu5 »

I've been using docker swarm on Hetzner for my fledgling business and am quite happy with it. The main feature I use is rolling upgrades that make it very easy to deploy changes.

It's simple, and has all the features I need for the stage I'm at. Once I have a more demanding infrastructure I'll probably switch over to a managed kubernetes, but those platforms have a significantly higher unit cost.

Re: Highly available Kubernetes with batteries for small business

#17

Post by xiwenc »

farisjarrah wrote: post #10

Hello, just out of curiosity, is using the NFS Client Provisioner Helm chart necessary anymore for normal kubernetes deployments? My company was using it, but it became a bit of a hassle on GKE for our team, as we found that A) if you tried to reprovision the NFS Client Provisioner then it would no longer mount the NFS share directly, it would create a new subdirectory and the files in the top level of the NFS share…

You are right the NFS client provisioner is not needed. This approach was chosen because the NFS server address only has to be configured once for the provisioner. Each PVC claims a subfolder within the shared NFS share. This might be undesirable for certain scenarios, but it works for us with zero friction.

Creating a PVC is as simple as:

  ---
  kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
  apiVersion: v1
  metadata:
    name: data
  spec:
    accessModes:
      - ReadWriteMany
    resources:
      requests:
        storage: 5Gi
And because of this, it's compatible with pretty much all helm charts that rely on the default StorageClass that works without extra configurations or manual operations like creating shares and figuring out what NFS server to use.

Re: Highly available Kubernetes with batteries for small business

#18

Post by dewey »

BossingAround wrote: post #16

Any resources on when does it make sense to go from cloud, managed, SaaS kubernetes to an on-prem deployment..?

Once you or your cloud costs are big enough to employ full time staff to look after servers, racks and network equipment and running your workloads. Before that it's most likely not worth it if it's not your core business.

Re: Highly available Kubernetes with batteries for small business

#19

Post by manquer »

solotronics wrote: post #11
CSDude wrote: post #5

It feels like a huge hassle for a small business. Use a cloud, it's not that expensive. If, not even using a cloud is an option, you can still mount NFS, use a bridged network and use DHCP from that router, and run your software in systemd/upstart or simple Docker containers. I don't like to sound like a grumpy old man that yells at new tech, I'm all good for experimentation home setups involving these, but every com…

For someone who is interested and capable the costs are an order of magnitude lower for self hosting. Your right for the most part small business would be better off using an existing cloud, they dont have the skillset to properly design and manage something like this themselves.

Even with the skill sets, i am not sure the costs are lower in most cases, depending on where you are your uplink costs can be substantial, you might have a asymmetric link or your ToS with the ISP may forbid any hosting services or just poor internet speeds. Without a leased line ISPs are not going to give a uptime SLA or a ring topology for redundancy etc, Reliability is expensive, there are enough cheap k8s/VPS providers at sub $50 month (For ex Digital Ocean).

Re: Highly available Kubernetes with batteries for small business

#20

Post by DenseComet »

farisjarrah wrote: post #10

Hello, just out of curiosity, is using the NFS Client Provisioner Helm chart necessary anymore for normal kubernetes deployments? My company was using it, but it became a bit of a hassle on GKE for our team, as we found that A) if you tried to reprovision the NFS Client Provisioner then it would no longer mount the NFS share directly, it would create a new subdirectory and the files in the top level of the NFS share…

I've been using the NFS client provisioner for my lab k8s cluster for a while. The reason I decided to use it was because I wanted to avoid having to create the shares for that service manually. I thought this would be useful for StatefulSets, which provisions a single volume for every pod, letting the application manage replication.

After a while, I've realized that it was a bad idea, because it turns out I don't run many services so creating a share for each service is a big deal, and that storing the StatefulSet volumes on a single server basically defeats the purpose of StatefulSets.

The second problem was that when I deployed it to a new cluster, I would get new paths on the NFS server, so the data from a previous cluster was not recognized. Since it is a lab environment, it is better for me to not bother with backing up the k8s cluster. With set paths, I can backup the NFS server, and redeploy a clean k8s cluster from the manifests and have the pods recognize previously written data.

As far as I can tell, the provisioner is mostly beneficial if you need to create volumes on the fly (although its possible that this is also possible with directly mounting NFS shares). On another note, have you looked at using one of the many ways of using persistent storage with GKE that isn't NFS? It seems that Google has created connectors and stuff for their own cloud storage that might be more straightforward to use.

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