I’m thinking about starting a self hosting setup, and my first thought was to install k8s (k3s probably) and containerise everything.
But I see most people on here seem to recommend virtualizing everything with proxmox.
What are the benefits of using VMs/proxmox over containers/k8s?
Or really I’m more interested in the reverse, are there reasons not to just run everything with k8s as the base layer? Since it’s more relevant to my actual job, I’d lean towards ramping up on k8s unless there’s a compelling reason not to.
Unless you have multiple systems, I don’t think k8s will yield much benefit over plain docker.
So, if I plan to build a pi cluster I should get familiar with k8s?
The basics can be useful there. The whole idea with k8s is to be able to run applications across multiple hosts in a given fleet. Your cluster can be that fleet! :)
Also k8s is in high demand in the sector, so those are good skills that could be turned into $$
I’m running a 3 pi cluster with k3s at the moment. The main benefit I’ve found is that all my pis run exactly the same software setup as a base so it’s easy to add new ones or replace/update one. I use a deployment management application to push my deployments too which means it’s super easy to redeploy everything if something goes funky.
That can be fun. The benefit of kubernetes is flexibility in the orchestration and (sometimes) scaling. Also the tooling in Kubernetes is more sofisticated compared to plain containers or manual services.
Kubernetes is basically just a finite-state machine that is able to manage a certain number of nodes as a pool of resources. This has added complexity compared to you managing the scheduling (I.e. I install this service on this box and this on this other box), but it also allows for much easier automation.
VMs are often imperative and can be quite easy and familiar to setup for most people, but can be harder or more time-consuming to reproduce, depending on the type of update or error to be fixed. They have their own kernel and can have window managers and graphical interfaces, and can therefore also be a bit resource heavy.
Containers are declarative and are quite easy to reproduce, but can be harder to setup, as you’ll have to work by trial-and-error from the CLI. They also run on your computers kernel and can be extremely slimmed down.
They are both powerful, depends how you want to maintain and interface with them, how resource efficient you want them to be, and how much you’re willing to learn if necessary.
That sums it up really well.
I generally tend to try to use containers for everything and only branch out to VMs if it doesn’t work or I need more separation.
This is my general recommendation as containers are easier to set up and in my opinion individual software packages are easier to maintain with things like compose. I have limited time for my self hosted instance and that took away a lot of work, especially when updating.
That sums it up really well.
I generally tend to try to use containers for everything and only branch out to VMs if it doesn’t work or I need more separation.
This is my general recommendation as containers are easier to set up and in my opinion individual software packages are easier to maintain with things like compose. I have limited time for my self hosted instance and that took away a lot of work, especially when updating.
Personally I always use containers unless there is a good reason to use a VM, and those reasons do exist. Sometime you want a whole, fully functional OS complete with custom kernel, in that situation a VM is a good idea, sometimes a utility only comes packaged as a VM.
But absent of a good reason, containers are just better in the majority of cases
It depends on your use case and what you are trying to achieve.
You do not need k8s (or k3s…) to use containers though. Plain old containers could also suffice, or Docker Swarm if you need some container orchestration functionality.
Trying to learn k8s would be a good reason to use k8s though :)
Por que los dos?
Debian hypervisor with raidz2 hosting vms, the main ones being 1 main freebsd host with 20 jails containing 1-2 apps each, and 1 main debian vm hosting things that are too much of a pain in the ass to get running on freebsd, so it hosts 5 docker containers.
Rocks my world.
This is the way
Why not do both ? As I understand it, to do kubernetes clusters, you must have at least 3 hosts. They don’t need to be 3 different physical hosts: they could be VM (hosted on Proxmox).
Proxmox also having a very strong implementation of ZFS, then it could be used as the storage « host », and it gives you also the option to do snapshots of the VM (and the storage pool), as well as replication/etc.
A k8s cluster can run on a single host if that’s what you want. I’m not sure if it would be worth the virtualisation cost to run it on VMs in the middle as well. If you were only ever going to run on a single host I probably wouldn’t use k8s though, I would just run containers. 🤷♂️
They don’t need to be 3 different physical hosts: they could be VM (hosted on Proxmox).
That is fine for training purposes, but not for real hosting. You typically don’t guard against software crashes, but against hardware failures/outages. And this it not given with all three nodes on the same physical system.
In that case you can simply skip the HA setup and go with a single node. Or not use k8s at all and just manage containers using ansible and systemd or whatever.
My backup solution is rsync and so I really like docker-compose since it usually means there is zero config for restoration of backups on a new computer besides installing docker-compose (which is usually one line on the terminal).
You can try casaOS.
https://github.com/IceWhaleTech/CasaOS
Its something like k8s. But it is easy to use and works very well with docker containers.
Not a proxmox pro by any means, but it can do both VMs and containers. I have a few VMs for various Linux distros to play around with. I also have one dedicated VM for all my security related tools.
Stuff like PI hole, jellyfin, logstash, etc. dont really have any need for a full OS, so a container works perfectly. Plus having a full OS with several things running on it makes it more difficult if you just need to restart one service
I started doing everything in VMs but over time realized some things were better to maintain as containers
I use proxmox for the sole benefit of just spinning up a VM of choice without having to deal with usb-sticks, etc.
From there I just run everything with Docker containers, via Portainer.
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I personally really, really like (Docker) containers and I host most of my stuff with it, on a Raspberry Pi and on (free tier) Oracle Cloud VPS’s. I also plan to (re)install Proxmox on a spare old laptop and run some stuff in VMs on that (namely Home Assistant) and might try a NixOS server too.
So really, use both. Use the right tool for the job. And you can also run containers in VMs and even use Ansible to configure everything with playbooks, allowing you to re-run said playbooks when things go wrong.
Why not use both? I have PVE installed on all of my hosts and then use k3s/docker in VMs. If there ever is anything you don’t want to or just can’t deploy as a container (e.g. opnsense, hassio, truenas, windows [for whatever reason you might have]), you can just spin it up as a VM and not worry about adding and maintaining another physical machine
