Kubernetes is useful if you have gone full cattle over pets. And that is very uncommon in home setups. If you only own one or two small machines you cannot destroy infra easily in a "cattle" way, and the bloatware that comes with Kubernetes doesn't help you neither.

In homelabs and home servers the pros of Kubernetes are not very useful: high availability, auto-scaling, gitops integrations, etc: Why would you need autoscaling and HA for a SFTP used only by you? Instead you write a docker-compose.yml and call it a day.

I run k3s and all my stuff runs in it no need to deal with docker anymore.

I manage like 200 servers in Google cloud k8s but I don't think I'd do that for home use. The core purpose is to manage multiple servers and assign processes between them, auto scaling, cluster internal network - running docker containers for single instance apps for personal use doesn't require this kind of complexity

My NAS software has a docker thing just built into it. I can upload or specify a package and it just runs it on the local hardware. If you have a Linux shell, I guess all you really have to do is run dockerd to start the daemon, make sure your network config allows connections, and upload your docker containers to it for running

Kubernetes is great if you run lots of services and/or already use kubernetes at work. I use it all the time and I've learned a lot on my personal cluster that I've taken to work to improve their systems. If you're used to managing infra already then it's not that much more work, and it's great to be able to shutdown a server for maintenance and not have to worry about more than a brief blip on your home services.

I use k8s at work and have built a k8s cluster in my homelab... but I did not like it. I tore it down, and currently using podman, and don't think I would go back to k8s (though I would definitely use docker as an alternative to podman and would probably even recommend it over podman for beginners even though I've settled on podman for myself).

1. K8s itself is quite resource-consuming, especially on ram. My homelab is built on old/junk hardware from retired workstations. I don't want the kubelet itself sucking up half my ram. Things like k3s help with this considerably, but that's not quite precisely k8s either. If I'm going to start trimming off the parts of k8s I don't need, I end up going all the way to single-node podman/docker... not the halfway point that is k3s.
2. If you don't use hostNetworking, the k8s model of traffic routes only with the cluster except for egress is all pure overhead. It's totally necessary with you have a thousand engineers slinging services around your cluster, but there's no benefit to this level fo rigor in service management in a homelab. Here again, the networking in podman/docker is more straightforward and maps better to the stuff I want to do in my homelab.
3. Podman accepts a subset of k8s resource-yaml as a docker-compose-like config interface. This lets me use my familiarity with k8s configs iny podman setup.

Overall, the simplicity and lightweight resource consumption of podman/docker are are what I value at home. The extra layers of abstraction and constraints k8s employs are valuable at work, where we have a lot of machines and alot of people that must coordinate effectively... but I don't have those problems at home and the overhead (compute overhead, conceptual overhead, and config-overhesd) of k8s' solutions to them is annoying there.

Kubernetes is awesome for self hosting, but tbh is superpower isn't multi-node/scalability/clustering shenanigans, it's that because every bit of configuration is just an object in the API, you can really easily version control everything - charts and config in git, tools like Helm make applying changes super easy, use Renovate to do automatic updates, use your CI tool of choice to deploy on commit, leverage your hobby into a DevOps role, profit

Seems a bit overkill for a personal use selfhosting set-up.

Personally, I don't need anything that requires multiple replicas and loadbalencers.

Do people who have homelabs actually need them? Or is it just for learning?

Went swarm instead. I dont need a department of k8s consultants.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

11 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 11 acronyms.

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I like the concept, but hate the configuration schema and tooling which is all needlessly obtuse (eg. helm)

Nomad all the way. K8s is so bloated. Docker swarm can only do docker. Nomad can do basically anything.

I am insane and use bare bone LXC.

Stupid ramblings you can probably ignore:

The Lemmy instance I'm speaking from right now is running in my k8s cluster.

I run a 2 node k3s cluster. There are a few small advantages over docker swarm, built-in network policies to lock down my VPN/Torrent pod being the main one.

Other than that writing kubernetes yaml files is a lot more verbose than docker-compose. Helm does make it bearable, though.

Due to real-life my migration to the cluster is real slow, but the goal is to move all my services over.

It's not "better" than compose but I like it and it's nice to have worked with it.

I love kubernetes. At the start of the year I installed k3s von my VPS and moved over all my services. It was a great learning opportunity that also helped immensely for my job.

It works just as well as my old docker compose setup, and I love how everything is contained in one place in the manifests. I don't need to log in to the server and issue docker commands anymore (or write scripts / CI stages that do so for me).

Love is a strong word, but kubernetes is definitely interesting. I'm finishing up a migration of my homelab from a docker host running in a VM managed with Portainer to one smaller VM and three refurbished lenovo mini PCs running Rancher. It hasn't been an easy road, but I chose to go with Rancher and k3s since it seemed to handle my usecase better than Portainer and Docker Swarm could. I can't pass up those cheap mini PCs

I have a K3OS cluster built out of a bunch of raspberry pis, it works well.

The big reason I like kubernetes is that once it is up and running with git ops style management, adding another service becomes trivial.

I just copy paste one if my e is ting services, tweak the names/namespaces, and then change the specific for the pods to match what their docker configuration needs, ie what folders need mounting and any other secrets or configs.

I then just commit the changes to github and apply them to the cluster.

The process of being able to roll back changes via git is awesome

Docker with or without Compose and systemd is good enough for most of my use cases. SaltStack is good enough for config-as-code.

I do aks. I can't say love is the right word for it. Lol

Used k3s to manage my single instance. Lots of gotcha moments to learn! Will add Flux for CD after I decide on how to self-host the Git server

I've spent the last two weeks on getting a k3s cluster working and I've had nothing but problems but it has been a great catalysts for learning new tools like ansible and load balancers. I finally got the cluster working last night. If anyone else is having wierd issues with the cluster timing out ETCD needs fast storage. Moving my VMs from my spinning rust to a cheap SSD fixed all my problems.

K3s seems pretty cool

Here's a slightly different story: I run OpenBSD on 2 bare-metal machines in 2 different physical locations. I used k8s at work for a bit until I steered my career more towards programming. Having k8s knowledge handy doesn't really help me so much now.

On OpenBSD there is no Kubernetes. Because I've got just two hosts, I've managed them with plain SSH and the default init system for 5+ years without any problems.

Running an RKE cluster as VMs on my ceph+proxmox cluster. Using Rook and external ceph as my storage backend and loving it. I haven't fully migrated all of my services, but thus far it's working well enough for me!

I feel like it took me quite a while to get the hang of Docker, and Kubernetes on a general look seems all that much more daunting! Hopefully one day I can break it down into smaller pieces so I can get started with it!

I am using Unraid to run docker, but want to use k3s (again) to turn some old laptops I have lying around into commodity hardware