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Rebuilding my homelab: Suffering as a service

xeiaso.net

51–60 of 65 posts

Re: Rebuilding my homelab: Suffering as a service

#51

Good place to tell people about CKD8S. It acts as an IaC translating TS to K3 Yalm greatly simplifying working in K8. Developers shouldn't be writing YAML.

Hot take: infrastructure shouldn't be created imperatively; you wind up with fun surprises too often. Hotter take: devs shouldn't be running infra at all, DevOps was a mistake. Return to specialized roles.

You don't have to use CDK8s in an imperative way. The benefit is you get _really_ good typing, which makes writing infra much easier than YAML.

Re: Rebuilding my homelab: Suffering as a service

#52
post #49

So in summary a former NixOS user now use a preconfigured OS dedicated to run one single platform (k8s) and still suffer for having to tinker with everything. It would have been fun or wise if she had gone back to Nix in the end.

> a former NixOS user Why did the author stop using NixOS? This is the first time I'm hearing about a veteran NixOS user giving up on it.

It mostly seems due to some drama going on in the Nix community rather than some technical reason.

https://xeiaso.net/blog/2024/much-ado-about-nothing/

Re: Rebuilding my homelab: Suffering as a service

#53
I really enjoy reading about what people do in their homelab. It has turned into platforms that encourages actual 'doing' in contrast to just 'thinking about it'. When I am interviewing to hire a DevOps or System Engineering person, I love it when they have an example of how they pushed their knowledge outside of their core job. Just because your company isn't doing something does not need to block you from trying it.

There are some really neat things going on in the micro-homelab space as well - Using very small machines with very lower power footprint that opens up lots of possibilities. The N100 price/powerpoint has opened up more options along side the Raspberry PI and it friends. So cool!

Then there is this guy: https://youtu.be/-b3t37SIyBs

What does that nutjob run? Oh wait, I know! Keep on lab'ing and learning!

Re: Rebuilding my homelab: Suffering as a service

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don’t use Kubernetes at home because it’s the easiest tool for the job. They use it in home labs because it’s a safe and easy environment to learn, practice, and explore. Most importantly: It’s a low-consequence environment. If you accidentally bring everything down at your homelab, the only person who suffers is you. You don’t get that degree of safety to explore and experiment when you’re using company resou…

Incorrect sir. I am way more concerned about my wife and kids as end users than i am about any employees

You're more concerned about your home Plex server going down than the service you run at work?

Re: Rebuilding my homelab: Suffering as a service

#55
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incorrect sir. I am way more concerned about my wife and kids as end users than i am about any employees

You're more concerned about your home Plex server going down than the service you run at work?

Doubtful. But things like mail, documents, file storage, etc might be another story.

It depends on what the person in question is hosting, and how it relates to the life of the SO. There are a lot of options around, just take a look at the awesome-selfhosted repo on github

Re: Rebuilding my homelab: Suffering as a service

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don’t use Kubernetes at home because it’s the easiest tool for the job. They use it in home labs because it’s a safe and easy environment to learn, practice, and explore. Most importantly: It’s a low-consequence environment. If you accidentally bring everything down at your homelab, the only person who suffers is you. You don’t get that degree of safety to explore and experiment when you’re using company resou…

Incorrect sir. I am way more concerned about my wife and kids as end users than i am about any employees

Homelab. Emphasis on lab. Sounds like you (also?) have a "home prod".

Re: Rebuilding my homelab: Suffering as a service

#57

My contrarian take is that eventually k8s will be recognized as the overcomplication it is; and better methods of managing less than 10,000 VMs will be researched and used.

This is incredibly popular a take, and this anti-k8s is rapidly upvoted almost every time. The systemd hate has cooled a bit, but it too functions as a sizable attractor for disdain & accusation hurling. Let's look at one of my favorite excerpts from the article, on systemd: > Fleet was glorious. It was what made me decide to actually learn how to use systemd in earnest. Before I had just been a "bloat bad so systemd…

I once joined a project which had decided against Kubernetes years prior

For my entire stay there, half of the time was spent on reinventing the wheel, but worse.

There surely are lots of bloated and overly complex projects out there, but I'd say for what Kubernetes does, it's a very elegant solution to a very, very complex problem and not one of those.

Re: Rebuilding my homelab: Suffering as a service

#58
post #4

Well, a translation can be: a NixOS user tried some from the IT dark-modern age and find how much it suck, nothing extraordinary, unfortunately most people fails to even understand that some Big of IT have interest in crappy solutions because they allow commerce while good ones do not. Back then was the full-stack-virtualization era where a large flock of biped sheep say that VMWare "is the future, today" of course o…

>Big of IT have interest in crappy solutions because they allow commerce while good ones do not. This is really true, I don't want to go into specifics but I've witnessed a standards committee advertising how much "vendor added value" their product allows (which is fancy language for the standard being incomplete and unusable without extensions). Oh and don't forget arbitrary limits on capabilities for no good reason…

The big issue is that we can't go much further that way. That's why for instance China industries advance while we regress. Interoperability and diversity are keys to success, cutting them means cutting the branch we are sit on...

These days many developers do not even know how to deploy their apps behind some third party APIs, finding a sysadmin it extremely hard and most are just "homelab guys with a bit of experience", how can we build something with this holes under our own feet?

A stupid example: photovoltaic is now relatively popular and that's clear the sole reasonable usage we have so far is self-consumption, we also have LFP storage still high priced (respect of China) but at a price tag sufficient to buy some storage at home like a giant UPS for a home, that's actually 400V batteries, most common inverters recharge directly from their MPPTs, actually the very same batteries are in most BEV. Well NO DAMN SINGLE VENDOR offer DC-to-DC direct charge for cars, simply nobody have apparently thought of that. We even have a standard https://www.iso.org/standard/77845.html but nobody seems to have implemented it commercially. We have a significant set of IoT appliance, only very few offer at least an open standard protocol for integration and most of them offer only ModBUS as an open standard protocol, something from the '70s, nice for certain usage also today but way too limited for many other possible usage. MQTT is a complicated option, still valid, very few implement it. Two more easy open options exists (Kafka, Matter) but nobody seems to implement them. We have a gazillion of VoIP solution almost no one is really simple and ready to deploy for anyone. Mumble/MurMur are the easiest for voice, but they are just chat, no calling ability, GNU SIPWitch is a lightweight SIP alternative, but it's far from being comfy for SOHO usage and Astersik/Yate are simply too complex for most users, similarly the first voice + screen sharing was in 1968 "The Mother of All Demos" we still lack a broad comfy screen sharing + voice solution, we even lack an IPv6 global per host to ease anything.

Long story short we waste gazillion of resources to maintain immense pile of crap following the classic https://xkcd.com/2347/ creating fragile monsters and struggling to go past this sorry state.

Re: Rebuilding my homelab: Suffering as a service

#60

My contrarian take is that eventually k8s will be recognized as the overcomplication it is; and better methods of managing less than 10,000 VMs will be researched and used.

Funny, I am a firm believer of the opposite: Kubernetes is the perfect level of abstraction for deploying applications.
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