My first attempt at running Kubernetes at home: spoiler alert, it was painful

Hey fellow homelabbers and tech enthusiasts!

Today, I want to talk about a journey many of us embark on: running Kubernetes at home. My first attempt? Well, the title gives it away – it was a rollercoaster of emotions, mostly frustration, but ultimately incredibly rewarding. If you're thinking about diving into Kubernetes, grab a coffee, because this is my story.

The Dream vs. Reality

Like many of you, I'd heard the buzz: Kubernetes is the future, it orchestrates containers, it's scalable, it's resilient! My mind immediately conjured images of a perfectly humming cluster, effortlessly deploying my personal apps, media servers, and maybe even a custom IoT dashboard. The reality? A tangled mess of YAML files, cryptic error messages, and nodes stubbornly refusing to join the party.

I started with a few old Raspberry Pis and an aging desktop PC running Proxmox. My initial thought was to go 'full fat' Kubernetes with kubeadm. Big mistake for a beginner, but hey, you live and learn, right?

The Gauntlet of Challenges

1. Networking: The Hydra of Homelab

Oh, networking. Where do I even begin? This was, by far, my biggest hurdle. Understanding CNI (Container Network Interface) plugins like Calico or Flannel, untangling IP ranges, ensuring my firewall (UFW on Ubuntu, Proxmox's own firewall) wasn't silently dropping packets, and making sure all nodes could communicate across subnets was a constant battle. I spent hours staring at ip a, route -n, and kubectl get pods -A trying to figure out why my CoreDNS pods were perpetually stuck in a Pending or CrashLoopBackOff state. I learned the hard way that a solid understanding of your home network, VLANs, and basic routing is absolutely non-negotiable.

2. Storage: The Persistent Headache

Next up: storage. Running stateless applications is one thing, but what about my Prometheus data, my Jenkins workspaces, or my Plex metadata? Enter Persistent Volumes (PVs) and Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs). Initially, I tried hostPath, which quickly showed its limitations for multi-node deployments. Then came NFS, which worked but felt a bit clunky. I even dabbled with Rook/Ceph, which was an entirely new beast to tame, requiring even more resources and a steeper learning curve. The lesson? Choose your storage solution wisely and understand its implications for data durability and node failure.

3. Resource Management & Node Taints

Why was my pod not scheduling? Why was it being evicted? I quickly had to wrap my head around CPU and memory requests/limits, node taints and tolerations. My old Pis, bless their hearts, just couldn't handle the load I was throwing at them, leading to constant resource starvation. Understanding how to wisely allocate resources and prevent critical services from being starved was a crucial, albeit painful, learning experience.

4. Security: An Afterthought That Became a Priority

In my initial rush to get *anything* working, security was unfortunately an afterthought. My first ingress controller was wide open, and I hadn't even considered network policies. As things slowly started to work, the paranoia set in. What if one of my containers was compromised? How could I isolate my applications? This led me down the rabbit hole of network policies, understanding RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) within Kubernetes, and ensuring my external access was properly secured with TLS and minimal exposure. I realized that a 'homelab' isn't an excuse for lax security; in fact, it's the perfect place to practice good security hygiene from day one. I started implementing basic network segmentation and ensuring services weren't exposed unless absolutely necessary, learning about ingress controllers and cert-manager for secure access.

Lessons Learned (The Hard Way)

• Start Small: For a homelab, k3s or MicroK8s are fantastic entry points. They abstract away a lot of the initial complexity of kubeadm. I eventually switched to k3s, and oh, what a difference!

• Networking is King: Seriously, spend time understanding your network. It will save you countless hours of debugging.

• Read the Docs: The official Kubernetes documentation is vast but invaluable. Don't be afraid to dig in.

• Troubleshooting Tools are Your Friends: kubectl describe, kubectl logs, journalctl -xeu kubelet, and a good understanding of crictl are indispensable.

• Patience and Persistence: Kubernetes has a steep learning curve. Don't get discouraged. Every error is a learning opportunity.

• Security from the Start: Even if it's just a homelab, think about network segmentation, RBAC, and secure external access early on. It's great practice for production environments.

Looking Back and Moving Forward

My first attempt at Kubernetes was indeed painful, filled with moments where I wanted to throw my keyboard across the room. But it was also one of the most significant learning experiences in my homelab journey. The satisfaction of finally seeing all my pods in a Running state, and then deploying my first application, was immense.

If you're on this journey, or thinking about starting, don't be afraid of the pain. Embrace the challenges, learn from every error, and celebrate every small victory. The world of container orchestration is incredibly powerful, and mastering it, even in a small homelab setting, opens up a world of possibilities.

Happy Kube-ing!