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Comment by nullwarp | Hacker News Reader

I've used everything under the sun and for homelab use IMO nothing beats using docker-compose and salt.

1. Unless you have crazy dynamic scaling needs, there's literally no point in using k8s or nomad 2. Unless you want RBAC and fine tuned ACL, theres literally no point in using k8s or Nomad

I hate this idea that you need a Ceph cluster and a 3 node HA cluster to have a home lab.

Not saying don't do it because you want to play/test/learn any of those platforms, just that if you are going to run a server service maybe consider if you are doing it for learning a task orchestration service or just want to run XYZ reliably.

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I was settled on Docker-Compose and Ansible for a long time, and while it was indeed quite easy to use once everything was tweaked correctly, what finally got me to move to k8s was HA. Having a single node with nginx, DNS resolution and Unifi controller running on it meant if I ever took the node down down for something, everything broke. Plex being down because I wanted to play with something unrelated wasn't ideal.

Agree that Ceph is ridiculously overkill though, I tried. Longhorn is much easier and perfectly fine for distributed storage.

Unifi controller isn't a dependency for your network to continue working. Config is distributed to the devices themselves, the controller is just a UI and collector of data.

I really like nomad for a single node homelab, it's super easy to maintain and deploy stuff.

I also run everything with docker stack(s) currently. Not using salt and haven’t heard of it. Why would I want salt and not ansible or something similar?

Salt (https://saltproject.io/) was an almost-winner around the time that Ansible blew up. It's pretty irrelevant nowadays since terraform and kubernetes - but still it's a very very good tool.

I'd suggest if you already know Ansible then don't change. If you have no idea which is which then try them both and let us know :)

I used saltstack at a decent scale.

The reasons that I used it were because the agent (called “minion”) initiates a connection towards the master, which can be handy if you’re behind NAT- but it was interesting to us because incoming connections are easier to manage at scale than outgoing ones.

Another reason was that the windows support was much more mature (though not perfect) and our environment was mostly Windows servers.

That said, installing the minion agent was easy, much easier than enabling winrm.

If you have sunk significant time into ansible I wouldn’t recommend switching, but it’s definitely not dead as per the sibling comment, I personally found it more enjoyable and easier to work with once understood the DSL pattern and added a few custom modules, it’s very simple underneath.

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