Currently, I run Unraid and have all of my services’ setup there as docker containers. While this is nice and easy to setup initially, it has some major downsides:
- It’s fragile. Unraid is prone to bugs/crashes with docker that take down my containers. It’s also not resilient so when things break I have to log in and fiddle.
- It’s mutable. I can’t use any infrastructure-as-code tools like terraform, and configuration sort of just exist in the UI. I can’t really roll back or recover easily.
- It’s single-node. Everything is tied to my one big server that runs the NAS, but I’d rather have the NAS as a separate fairly low-power appliance and then have a separate machine to handle things like VMs and containers.
So I’m looking ahead and thinking about what the next iteration of my homelab will look like. While I like unraid for the storage stuff, I’m a little tired of wrangling it into a container orchestrator and hypervisor, and I think this year I’ll split that job out to a dedicated machine. I’m comfortable with, and in fact prefer, IaC over fancy UIs and so would love to be able to use terraform or Pulumi or something like that. I would prefer something multi-node, as I want to be able to tie multiple machines together. And I want something that is fault-tolerant, as I host services for friends and family that currently require a lot of manual intervention to fix when they go down.
So the question is: how do you all do this? Kubernetes, docker-compose, Hashicorp Nomad? Do you run k3s, Harvester, or what? I’d love to get an idea of what people are doing and why, so I can get some ideas as to what I might do.
You should try out all the options you listed and the other recommendations and find what works best for you.
I personally use Kubernetes. It can be overwhelming but if you’re willing to learn some new jargon then try a managed kubernetes cluster. Like AKS or digital ocean kubernetes. I would avoid managing a kubernetes cluster yourself.
Kubernetes gets a lot of flack for being overly complicated but what is being overlooked with that statement is all the things that kubernetes does for you.
If you can spin up kubernetes with cert-manager, external-dns, and an ingress controller like istio then you got a whole automated data center for your docker containers.
I agree with this, though it’s not the easiest option. Ceph is amazing for storage, I am using mini pc nucs for my cluster and to expand storage I simply plan to add nodes and get the largest sata and m.2 SSD.
I recently setup velero for automated backups. It even is configured to dump my HA postgrrd DB and then backup the dump folder.
Other cool experiences I can think of is netdata with Prometheus metrics auto scraping pods by their annotations to pull their statistics in, and nothing is more satisfying then making a service highly available.