So I have rebuilt my Production rack with very little in terms of an actual software plan.
I host mostly docker contained services (Forgejo, Ghost Blog, OpenWebUI, Outline) and I was previously hosting each one in their own Ubuntu Server VM on Proxmox thus defeating the purpose.
So I was going to run a VM on each of these Thinkcentres that worked as a Kubernetes Cluster and then ran everything on that. But that also feels silly since these PCs are already Clustered through Proxmox 9.
I was thinking about using LXC but part of the point of the Kubernetes cluster was to learn a new skill that might be useful in my career and I don’t know how this will work with Cloudflared Tunnels which is my preferred means of exposing services to the internet.
I’m willing to take a class or follow a whole bunch of “how-to” videos, but I’m a little frazzled on my options. Any suggestions are welcome.
Ansible is y2k tech brought to you in 2010. Its workarounds for its many problems bring problems of their own. I’d recommend mgmtconfig, but it’s a deep pool if you’re just getting into it. Try Chef(cinc.sh) or saltstack, but keep mgmtconfig on the radar when you want to switch from 2010 tech to 2020 tech.
My issue with mgmt.config is that it bills itself as an api-driven “modern” orchestrator, but as soon as you don’t have systemd on clients, it becomes insanely complicated to blast out simple changes.
Mgmt.config also claims to be “easy”, but you have to learn MCL’s weird syntax, which the issue I have with chef and its use of ruby.
Yes, ansible is relatively simple, but it runs on anything (including being supported on actual arm64) and I daresay that layering roles and modules makes ansible quite powerful.
It’s kind of like nagios… Nagios sucks. But it has such a massive library of monitoring tricks and tools that it will be around forever.
You skewer two apps for syntax, but not Ansible’s fucking YAML? Dood. I’m building out a layered declarative config at the day-job, and it’s just page after page with python’s indentation fixation and powershell’s bipolar expressions. This is better for you?
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Wow, huge disagree on saltstack and chef being ahead of Ansible. I’ve used all 3 in production (and even Puppet) and watched Ansible absolutely surge onto the scene and displace everyone else in the enterprise space in a scant few years.
Ansible is just so much lower overhead and so much easier to understand and make changes to. It’s dominating the configuration management space for a reason. And nearly all of the self hosted/homelab space is active in Ansible and have tons of well baked playbooks.
Popular isn’t always better. See: Betamax/VHS, Blu-ray vs HDDVD, skype/MSSkype, everything vs Teams, everything vs Outlook, everything vs Azure. Ansible is accessible like DUPLO is accessible, man, and with the payola like Blu-ray got and the pressuring like what shot systemd into the frame, of course it would appeal to the C-suite.
Throwing a few-thousand at Ansible/AAP and the jagged edges pop out – and we have a team of three that is dedicated to Nagios and AAP. And it’s never not glacially slow – orders of magnitude slower than absolutely everything.
Yeah, similar sized environments here too, but had good experiences with Ansible. Saw Chef struggle at even smaller scales. And Puppet. And Saltstack. But I’ve also seen all of them succeed too. Like most things it depends on how you run it. Nothing is a perfect solution. But I think Ansible has few game breaking tradeoffs for it’s advantages.