this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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From Docker with Ansible to k3s: I don't get it... (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 3 weeks ago by sunoc@sh.itjust.works to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Hey! I have been using Ansible to deploy Dockers for a few services on my Raspberry Pi for a while now and it's working great, but I want to learn MOAR and I need help...

Recently, I've been considering migrating to bare metal K3S for a few reasons:

  • To learn and actually practice K8S.
  • To have redundancy and to try HA.
  • My RPi are all already running on MicroOS, so it kind of make sense to me to try other SUSE stuff (?)
  • Maybe eventually being able to manage my two separated servers locations with a neat k3s + Tailscale setup!

Here is my problem: I don't understand how things are supposed to be done. All the examples I find feel wrong. More specifically:

  • Am I really supposed to have a collection of small yaml files for everything, that I use with kubectl apply -f ?? It feels wrong and way too "by hand"! Is there a more scripted way to do it? Should I stay with everything in Ansible ??
  • I see little to no example on how to deploy the service containers I want (pihole, navidrome, etc.) to a cluster, unlike docker-compose examples that can be found everywhere. Am I looking for the wrong thing?
  • Even official doc seems broken. Am I really supposed to run many helm commands (some of them how just fails) and try and get ssl certs just to have Rancher and its dashboard ?!

I feel that having a K3S + Traefik + Longhorn + Rancher on MicroOS should be straightforward, but it's really not.

It's very much a noob question, but I really want to understand what I am doing wrong. I'm really looking for advice and especially configuration examples that I could try to copy, use and modify!

Thanks in advance,

Cheers!

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[–] testgoofy 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (14 children)

Hey there,

I made a similar journey a few years ago. But I only have one home server and do not run my services in high availability (HA). As @non_burglar@lemmy.world mentioned, to run a service in HA, you need more than "just scaling up". You need to exactly know what talks when to whom. For example, database entries or file writes will be difficult when scaling up a service not ready for HA.

Here are my solutions for your challenges:

  • No, you are not supposed to run kubectl apply -f for each file. I would strongly recommend helm. Then you just have to run helm install per service. If you want to write each service by yourself, you will end up with multiple .yaml files. I do it this way. Normally, you create one repository per service, which holds all YAML files. Alternatively, you could use a predefined Helm Chart and just customize the settings. This is comparable to DockerHub.
  • If you want to deploy to a cluster, you just have to deploy to one server. If in your .yaml configuration multiple replicas are defined, k8s will automatically balance these replicas on multiple servers and split the entire load on all servers in the same cluster. If you just look for configuration examples, look into Helm Charts. Often service provide examples only for Docker (and Docker Compose) and not for K8s.
  • As I see it, you only have to run a single line of install script on your first server and afterward join the cluster with the second server. Then you have k3s deployed. Traefik will be installed alongside k3s. If you want to access the dashboard of Traefik and install rancher and longhorn, yes, you will have to run multiple installations. Since you already have experience with Ansible, I suggest putting everything for the "base installation" into one playbook and then executing this playbook one.

Changelog:

  • Removeing k3s install command. If you want to use it, look it up on the official website. Do not copy paste the command from a random user on lemmy ;) Thanks to @atzanteol@sh.itjust.works for bringing up this topic.
[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 6 points 3 weeks ago (13 children)

curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io/ | sh -

Never, ever install anything this way. The trend of "just run this shell script off the internet" is a menace. You don't know what that script does, what repositories it may add, what it may install, whether somebody is typo-squatting the URL and you're running something else, etc.

It's just a bad idea. If you disagree then I have one question - how would you uninstall k3s after you ran that blackbox?

[–] jlh@lemmy.jlh.name 1 points 3 weeks ago

https://docs.k3s.io/installation/uninstall

There is also a k3s option for Nixos, which removes the security and side-affect risks of running a random bash script installer.

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