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Comment by from-nibly | Hacker News Reader

> Practically, it is foolishness, for what you save in money you lose in time and sanity.

Kubernetes gets a lot of side eyes in the self-hosted community. That's all of self hosting though. So why not go all in?

I've got 3 dell r720XDs running nixos with k3s in multi master mode. It runs rook/ceph for storage, and I've got like 12 hard drives in various sizes. My favorite party trick is yoinking a random hard drive out of the cluster while streaming videos. Does not care. Plug it back in and it's like nothing happened. I've still got tons of room and I keep finding useful things to host on it.

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Plenty of people use k8s or k3s for self hosting. But for most, the added complexity doesn't buy enough for the trade-off to be worth it. Keep in mind most people have a single node, so docker does everything they need.

Personally, even with a 4 node setup (of tiny desktops; the hardware you have would easily cost me $200/mo in power bills), I use docker swarm. Old and unloved, but does everything I need for multi node deployment and orchestration with only a sliver more complexity than vanilla docker.

Yeah don't ask me about my power bill, It's definitely in the vanity realm. I have cheap power where I live so it's not anywhere near $200. Still too high though. One day I'll get solar to offset it.

I just use NixOS as a VM and run services as containers directly. Self-plug: I wrote a tool that makes it easy to run Docker Compose projects on NixOS [1].

This way, I get the advantages of NixOS config, while also being able to run arbitrary applications that might not be available on nixpkgs.

As far as storage goes, I just use ZFS on the hypervisor (Proxmox) and expose that over NFS locally.

[1] https://github.com/aksiksi/compose2nix

For a homelab k8s is way overkill. I do it because self-hosting is 1 part utility to 2 parts education.

it's become much easier in the last few years. Talos + Flux + Renovate can be built in a day [0], and simplifies storage/backups/patching even for single-node clusters. There's also a great community, with services like kubesearch [1] providing templates for tons of apps

[0] https://github.com/onedr0p/cluster-template

[1] https://kubesearch.dev

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