home-ops

wn home-ops repo & folks. https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops among techies I've seen some lightbulbs go off by calling the system a home-cloud. I'm curious what other nomenclature people have seen used, and how they feel it's been received?

is incredibly shitty attitude. Fuck around and find out is the hacker spirit. Its actually not hard if you try, and actually having a base platform where things follow common patterns & practices & you can reuse existing skills & services is kind of great. Everything is amazing but the snivelling shitty whining without even making the tiniest little case for your unkind low-effort hating will surely continue. Low signal people will remain low signal, best avoid.

onedr0p can use well known community tools like Kubernetes, Flux ci/CD, gitops, and helm to get it done, to have other smart making the tools of self-hosting better for him. He's still the self hosting, but there's a sizable % of the engineering talent of the world helping to make his self hosting better & easier. That's pretty novel, and pretty excellent imo. https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops

oting that Kubernetes is also pushing towards neutrality here; Helm has never been an official tool, but Kustomzie is builtin to kubectl & is being removed. https://github.com/orgs/kubernetes/projects/183/views/1?filt... There's a variety of smart awesome options out there. First place I worked at that went to kube used jsonnet (which alas went unmaintained). Folks love CUE and Dhall and others. But to my knowledge there's no massive bases of packaged software like exists for Helm. Two examples, https://github.com/bitnami/charts/tree/main/bitnami https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops . It'd be lovely to see more works outside Helm. Thanks sysdig for your 1.31 write up, https://sysdig.com/blog/whats-new-kubernetes-1-31/

hater", please actually give it a chance before you decry it as "complicated bad lol". Shit's complicated because life is complicated. Shits complicated because life is complicated. In both cases, having encompassing ways to compose connectivity has created a stable base (starting point to expert/advanced capable) that allowed huge communities to bloom. Rather than every person being out there by ourselves, the same tools work well for all users, the same tools are practiced with the same conventions. Overarching is key to commonality being possible. You could walk up to my computer and run 'systemd cat' on any service on it, and quickly see how stuff was setup (especially on my computers which make heavy use of environment variables where possible); before every distro and to a sizable degree every single program was launched & configured differently, requires plucking through init scripts to see how or if the init script was modified. But everything has a well defined shape and form in systemd, a huge variety of capabilities for controlling launch characteristics, process isolation, ulimits, user/group privileges, special tmp directories is all provided out of the box in a way that means there's one man page to go to, and that's instantly visible with every option detailed, so we don't have to go spelunking. The Cloud Native paradigm that Kubernetes practices is a similar work of revelation, offering similar batteries included capabilities. Is it confusing having pods, replicasets, and services? Yes perhaps at first. But it's unparalleled that one just POSTs resources one wants to an API-server and let's the system start & keep that running; this autonomic behavior is incredibly freeing, leaving control loops doing what humans have had to shepherd & maintain themselves for decades; a paradigm break turning human intent directly into consistent running managed systems. The many abstractions/resource types are warranted, they are separate composable pieces that allow so much. Need to serve on a second port? Easy; new service since the service is separate from the deployment. Why are there so many different types? Because computers are complex, because this is a model of what really is. Maybe we can reshuffle to get different views, but most of that complexity will need to stay around, but perhaps in refactores shapes. And like systemd, Kubernetes with it's Desired State Management and operators creates a highly visible highly explorable system; any practitioner can walk up to any cluster and start gleaning tons of information from it, can easily see it run. It's a wrong hearted view to think that simpler is better. We should start with essential complexity & figure out simultaneously a) how to leverage and b) how to cut direct paths through our complex capable systems. We gain more by permitting and enabling than by pruning. We gain my by being capable of working at both big and small scales than we gain by winnowing down/down scoping our use cases. The proof is in the pudding. Today there's hundreds of guides one can go through in an hour to setup & get started running some services on k3s. Today there's a colossal communities of homelab operators sharing helm charts & resources (ex: https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops), the likes of which has vastly outclassed where we have stood before. Being afraid of & shying away from complexity is a natural response, but i want people to show that they see so many of the underlying simplicities & conceptions that we have gotten from kube that do make things vastly simpler than the wild West untamed world we came from, where there weren't unified patterns of API servers & operators, handling different resources but all alike & consistent. To conquer complexity you must understand it, and I think very few of those with a true view of Kubernetes complexity have the sense that there are massive opportunities for better, for simpler. To me, the mission, the goal, the plan should be to better manage & better package Kubernetes to better onboard & help humans through it, to try to walk people into what these abstractions are for & shine lights on how they all mirror real things computers need to be doing. (Technical note, Kubernetes typically runs 0 vm's, it runs containers. With notable exceptions being snap-in OCI runtimes like Firecracker and Kata which indeed host pods as vms. Kine relies on containers are far more optimizable; works like Puzzlefs and Composefs CSIs can snap-in to allow vastly more memory-and-storage-efficient filesystems to boot. So many wonderful pluggable/snappable layers; CNI for networking too.)

came along. Docker and ansible and others have been around, but theres never been remotely the success there has been today in empowering users to setup & run complex services. We really have clawed out of the server-hugging jungle &started building some villages. It's wonderful to see.

an experience at their back, their running of services isnt as simple to understand from the start but goes much much further, is much more mature & well supported in the long run. It's a major phase change for home-ops, picking tech because it's strong & good, not just easier to get started. And over time I think the on ramps & the mental models will be ever more visible, that the old cobble it together from pieces ways will fade. There's so many rejectionist principles at play. There's many realms of Back-To-The-Land mentality, rejecting modernity & swearing we're better with less, that we free ourselves. Being willing & able to accept help & better starting places will, in my view, certainly take over; there's already huge scope home-ops folks can handily take on well beyond what would have been imagineable, and the share-ability keeps growing, we keep better amplifing each other by having these shared core home cloud platforms. I love the modern growth, embrace of good cloud tech at home.

rning these tools which is not easy, but from my interactions with people who do take the plunge from docker-compose or docker-swarm most of them stay and once they see the benefits of GitOps and Kubernetes cannot go back to their previous ways. Automation is king and it is much easier using Kubernetes because most of the tools exist for it already. 1. https://github.com/k8s-at-home/template-cluster-k3s 2. https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops 3. https://github.com/k8s-at-home/awesome-home-kubernetes

raw dropping amazing, & a colossal demonstration of how much mastery we've achieved over such a wide wide set of concerns. 5 years ago we didn't even have the shared language to express the goal/desire, the cloud was abstract, but now it's real & something we can do for $120 and a couple hours. And we'll only get better. We're only really just getting started with this inertia, only just started bringing a lot of big ideas into the commons. While the primary drivers are big & medium entities doing ops, this is a huge foothold for the home, for the hobbyist to get going with, to make running software simple but not too simple, to have a platform that scales from very low & easy to very big & fancy. There's a lot of epic & amazing home-cloud stuff going on, & this is all so new, & very technical, but over time I expect a lot of paths to be paved, a lot of lessons learned, and the amazing ultra-leading-edge works like onedr0p's homecloud[1] to spring into bloom & to seed new efforts. Having a rich, high-potential ecosystem that computing & the computing community can build atop of & get good & get more elegant with is a precondition for any other part of computing succeeding. Without good ops, personal computing can go nowhere, and we are so so so much better gathered & doing so much better than we were even half a decade ago. Once our own computing becomes possible, the spread of p2p & distributed systems might start. Even that doesn't seem ultra-necessary to me. I believe the mediums we have are enormously powerful, enormously flexible, and incredibly distributed if put to use for those ends. Specs like ActivityPub and ActivityStreams can remake how almost all software works, can provide the fabric of connectivity that makes connected networked systems so compelling, so interesting to participate in, without the top-down-control, with self-determinism & agency & genuine ownership of data. That we can have amazing new online vantage points for these wide & diverse feeds of information when we harken to protocols & feeds. Still missing right now, mobile/low power systems are still trapped in the old world: the most important device we own, our phones, can not participate in the new dawning better-ops cross-system-ops galaxy we are breathing life into. Unlocking mobile from the confines of narrow consumerdom is a long battle, and I mostly hope the overwhelming brilliance of self-hosting Linux makes Linux on the phone too compelling to allow these consumer, [1] https://github.com/onedr0p/home-cluster

o much sense, but so far i feel like such attempts are still basically unknown. heroku's really simmered it down to something that made extremely natural sense. huge props to that. too too much of this effort had to go into creating buildpacks & supporting language environments very very carefully very actively, that ability to stealth-containerize an app & not even notice is so much of the special sauce that makes this a hard, hard & eternal problem (because langauges/envs keep changing). there's still a lot of ease of use to Heroku that's potentially will be underrated and/or lost by the oncoming generations. i have high respect for how operateable Heroku is. [1] https://github.com/k8s-at-home/awesome-home-kubernetes [2] https://github.com/onedr0p/home-cluster/blob/main/cluster/ap... [3] https://github.com/weaveworks/awesome-gitops#tools

general proposes that you should have working models for the state of your world. In addition to the out-of-the-box machinery you get for running containers (deployment-sets), exposing them (services), &c, you get this pattern. You get other folks building operators/controllers that implement this pattern[1]. You get a consistent, powerful, extensible way of building. Nothing else comes close. There's nothing remotely as interesting in the field right now. The Cult of Easy is loud & bitterly angry about Kubernetes, hates it's "complexity", but what is actually complex is having a dozen different operational environments for different tools & systems. What is actually complex is operating systems yourself, rather than having operators to maintain systems. Kubernetes has some initial costs, it can feel daunting, but it is radically simpler in the long run because _it has a paradigm,_ an all inclusive paradigm that all systems can fit into, and the autonomic behaviors this paradigm supports radically transfer operational complexity from human to computer, across that broad/all-inclusive range of systems. There's a lot of easier this/harder that. No one tries to pitch Nomad or anything else as better, as deeper, as being more consistent, having a stronger core. Every article you hear on an alternative to Kubernetes is 98% "this was easier". I think those people, largely, miss the long game, the long view. A system that can adapt, that operationally can serve bigger & bigger scopes, ought to pay dividends to you as years go by. Kubernetes may take you longer to get going. But it is time enormously well spent, that will increase your capability & mastery of the world, & bring you together with others building radically great systems whether at home[2][3] or afar. It will be not just a way of running infrastructure, but help you re-think how you develop, and how to expose your own infrastructure & ideas more consistently, more clearly, in the new pattern language of autonomic machines that we have only just begun to build together. I encourage the bold explorers out there, learn Kubernetes, run Kubernetes. And to those of you pitching other things, please, I want you to talk up your big game better, tell me late-game scenarios, tell me how your system & I are going to grow together, advance each other. [1] https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/architecture/controller/... [2] https://github.com/onedr0p/home-cluster [3] https://github.com/k8s-at-home/awesome-home-kubernetes