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My self-hosting infrastructure, fully automated

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Re: My self-hosting infrastructure, fully automated

#31

Post by akkartik »

zenlot wrote: post #30
akkartik wrote: post #25

The question I have whenever I see something like this is what the upgrade process looks like. How much time do you spend per month upgrading dependencies, how many mailing lists you're subscribed to, etc. When the log4j thing blew up, how long did it take you to gain confidence that you were no longer impacted?

Doesn't really matter, as long as it's fun. Some people play games, so people enjoy re-configuring their setup (I do enjoy it too). It's not a business / prod env setting.

Yeah, that's totally fine. I ask in case someone has thought about it, so I can learn from them.

Doing just the fun parts of self-hosting will not get you to infrastructure.

Re: My self-hosting infrastructure, fully automated

#32

Post by walrus01 »

my main objection to this is choosing host machines that don't meet the criteria of anything like serious server-grade hardware.

if this is for a home lab where any one of the services run on it are not actually going to affect you if it goes belly up? or the whole host machine? sure, okay, but that's self hosting a home lab, not self-hosting actual infrastructure...

clearly the hardware shown in the image is meant to be small, not noisy, and not take up a lot of space, and operate in somebody's house.

but the people I know who seriously self host all their stuff have it on something like a few old Dell R620 1U servers with 1+1 dual hot swap power supplies, RAID-1 for the operating system boot, RAID-1 or RAID-6 (or something like mdadm raid6) for storage drives (again all hot swap capable), etc.

note that I am not talking about a lot of money here, you can buy the hardware I described in the preceding paragraph for $300 on eBay and then add your own choice of SSDs.

and not in a house, but in something like a small to medium sized ISP's colocation environment, with UPS, generator backed power, etc. also attached to network equipment and a DIA circuit that's considerably more serious than a tp-link unmanaged switch attached to a residential internet service.

Re: My self-hosting infrastructure, fully automated

#35

Post by indigodaddy »

gigel82 wrote: post #28

This needs a companion guide about how to set up the host machine. Which Linux distro to choose, how to set it up / harden it, nftables / firewall, public key login, etc. If anyone has one handy, I'd appreciate a link.

Doesn’t the ansible portion do all that? Believe he uses Rocky Linux.

Re: My self-hosting infrastructure, fully automated

#36

Post by walrus01 »

ekianjo wrote: post #34

You don't need Kubernetes to do self-hosting. Completely overkill.

I would rather choose something like xgp-ng as a hypervisor for a home lab environment such a this, instead of a custom one-off kubernetes environment.

Or just a total DIY xen or KVM hypervisor on debian or centos approach. But with considerably more RAM in the host machine than 16GB (like 64-128GB).

the kubernetes sort of makes sense if the purpose is also for the person who owns/operates it to test kubernetes things, learn kubernetes, or use it as a home lab of some larger similar environment that they have elsewhere.

Re: My self-hosting infrastructure, fully automated

#37

Post by dmayle »

gigel82 wrote: post #28

This needs a companion guide about how to set up the host machine. Which Linux distro to choose, how to set it up / harden it, nftables / firewall, public key login, etc. If anyone has one handy, I'd appreciate a link.

You are unlikely to find what you're looking for. I'm going to dig into this article a bit, but what you're talking about is inherently hard, and delivers tremendous value to businesses. There are a lot of people doing it for money, and someone builds something that starts to actually work, they get acquired, or they take their project and make it enterprise-y (because that's where the funding is).

There's flatcar and k3os and fedora coreos and talos and lokomotive. There are maybe a dozen others as well, but those are the ones I know something about.

The real problem is that the orchestration of PXE boot, DHCP, name services, server registration, cluster bootstrapping, while simultaneously building a light distribution that makes the right calls on persistence, security, etc. is just *really hard*.

I took at a stab at it myself (failed startup) and have a custom distribution based on alpine, but the amount of work to go from there to everything is so large that it's tough to take on if you're small (and there is the constant desire to go enterprise because of the money)

Re: My self-hosting infrastructure, fully automated

#38

Post by Spooky23 »

walrus01 wrote: post #32

my main objection to this is choosing host machines that don't meet the criteria of anything like serious server-grade hardware. if this is for a home lab where any one of the services run on it are not actually going to affect you if it goes belly up? or the whole host machine? sure, okay, but that's self hosting a home lab, not self-hosting actual infrastructure... clearly the hardware shown in the image is meant t…

All overkill. If you want something more reliable, get some late model HP or Dell thin clients and put Debian on them. Usually you can pick them up for I setup something like this to control some farm equipment when I was in college 20 years ago. The farmers’ son called me a few months ago because they were having an issue with the equipment. Turned out oily dust coated the thing and got inside - I had him pop the device open (old Wyse box running Slackware iirc) clean up the goop and hit it with rubbing alcohol. He dried it and everything is working again.

Re: My self-hosting infrastructure, fully automated

#39

Post by the_duke »

ekianjo wrote: post #34

You don't need Kubernetes to do self-hosting. Completely overkill.

You don't need it.

But Kubernetes exists for a reason and makes a lot of things easier.

If you are familiar with the ecosystem, k3s is a great foundation for self-hosted setups.

Especially thanks to the many helm charts and operators that exist.

Re: My self-hosting infrastructure, fully automated

#40

Post by z3t4 »

ekianjo wrote: post #34

You don't need Kubernetes to do self-hosting. Completely overkill.

Talking about overkill, he also use 4 physical machines each with a 4 core CPU. But its not about what you need, its about what you want to learn. So if you want to learn about cluster/orchestrating i think its warranted.
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