this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
9 points (100.0% liked)

Selfhosted

40403 readers
816 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
ruud
Loki
CannaVet
devve
HybridSarcasm
[email protected]
9
Deciding between Kubernetes or Docker Swarm (self.selfhosted)
submitted 1 year ago by bananess to c/selfhosted
23 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Hi all!

I have a couple of months to create and deploy a small cluster for running docker containers.

The cluster will consist of 3 master nodes and some workers. When it is ready, it will consist of about 15 servers.

I have little experience with Docker (managing some containers on my home server), I have spent the last 4 or 5 weeks studying and testing with Kubernetes and I think it's a little overkill for what it's going to take. You run the risk of adding unnecessary complexity.

I am seeing that instead Docker Swarm seems easier to set up and manage.

To consider that I will be on my own to manage it.

What do you think?

Thanks!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

I haven't used Docker Swarm (I have barely used Docker Compose), but I have run a couple on-prem Kubernetes clusters (at my house and for clients at my day job) and cloud Kubernetes clusters, so I can speak to how complex it is it set up and run.

My background is systems administration, engineering, IT, and now DevOps. I've been using Linux since Ubuntu 6.06.

I set up my Kubernetes cluster with kubeadm because I wanted to learn, and it took me about a weekend to get my single master, two worker cluster up and running. I think you could probably do this using k3s much faster and have less learning curve (you don't have to care as much about Container Network Interfaces, for example, because k3s makes that decision for you.)

There is a lot of documentation out there on Kubernetes. Helm as a "package manager" (really a templating engine) can be nice if the software you want to deploy has a Helm chart that is well written. Writing your own Helm charts can be a learning process, I've modified some but not written one from scratch yet.

Kubernetes releases new versions about quarterly. I've done several upgrades on my primary home cluster over the course of the past 2 years and they've been pretty smooth, about an hour of time investment ~~total~~ each. And remember, I'm on the more nerdy and complex flavor of Kubernetes. I think with k3s these would be even smoother and quicker.

I feel like Kubernetes knowledge is probably more valuable out in the industry if that's a factor for you. I haven't come across any Docker Swarm clusters in my DevOps travels, just Kubernetes and some HashiCorp Nomad.

I'm curious to see what folks say about Docker Swarm. If you have any questions about Kubernetes or running your workload on it, I'd be happy to try to help!

[–] bananess 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for the reply!

I also have a background as Linux Sysadmin but barely a couple of years.

I have managed to get a Kubernets cluster up and running but I have difficult setting up containers. The Classic "whoami" works flawless by Traefik for example, but doing the same for Portainer seems like impossibile for me right now, going crazy :D

I'm i choosing a difficult path? Is it possibile to have a good K8s cluster running nice without traefik?

Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I use ingress-ngnix for all my ingress controllers, I've only messed with Traefik a bit in Kubernetes and it felt like it was fighting me the whole time.

[–] bananess 2 points 1 year ago

Nice to know that I'm not the only one having this experience

load more comments (9 replies)