Lab Cluster¶

This repository is my lab Kubernetes cluster in a declarative state. Flux watches my cluster folder and makes the changes to my cluster based on the YAML manifests.

Feel free to open a Github issue or join the k8s@home Discord if you have any questions.

This repository is built off the k8s-at-home/template-cluster-k3s repository.

Cluster setup¶

My cluster is k3s provisioned overtop Ubuntu 21.04 using the Ansible galaxy role ansible-role-k3s. This is a semi hyper-converged cluster, workloads and block storage are sharing the same available resources on my nodes while I have a separate server for (NFS) file storage.

See my ansible directory for my playbooks and roles.

Cluster components¶

• calico: For internal cluster networking using BGP configured on Opnsense.
• rook-ceph: Provides persistent volumes, allowing any application to consume RBD block storage.
• Mozilla SOPS: Encrypts secrets which is safe to store - even to a public repository.
• external-dns: Creates DNS entries in a separate coredns deployment which is backed by my clusters etcd deployment.
• cert-manager: Configured to create TLS certs for all ingress services automatically using LetsEncrypt.
• kube-vip: HA solution for Kubernetes control plane
• Kasten: Data backup and recovery

Repository structure¶

The Git repository contains the following directories under cluster and are ordered below by how Flux will apply them.

• base directory is the entrypoint to Flux
• init directory contains SOPS and other secrets inittialization.
• crds directory contains custom resource definitions (CRDs) that need to exist globally in your cluster before anything else exists
• core directory (depends on crds) are important infrastructure applications (grouped by namespace) that should never be pruned by Flux
• apps directory (depends on core) is where your common applications (grouped by namespace) could be placed, Flux will prune resources here if they are not tracked by Git anymore

./cluster
├── ./apps
├── ./base
├── ./core
├── ./init
└── ./crds

Automate all the things!¶

• Github Actions for checking code formatting
• Rancher System Upgrade Controller to apply updates to k3s
• Renovate with the help of the k8s-at-home/renovate-helm-releases Github action keeps my application charts and container images up-to-date

Hardware¶

Tools¶

Thanks¶

A lot of inspiration for my cluster came from the people that have shared their clusters over at awesome-home-kubernetes