I've run my homelab with podman-systemd (quadlet) for awhile and every time I investigate a new k8s variant it just isn't worth the extra hassle. As part of my ancient Ansible playbook I just pre-pull images and drop unit files in the right place.
I even run my entire Voron 3D printer stack with podman-systemd so I can update and rollback all the components at once, although I'm looking at switching to mkosi and systemd-sysupdate and just update/rollback the entire disk image at once.
The main issues are:
1. A lot of people just distribute docker-compose files, so you have to convert it to systemd units.
2. A lot of docker images have a variety of complexities around user/privilege setup that you don't need with podman. Sometimes you need to do annoying userns idmapping, especially if a container refuses to run as root and/or switches to another user.
Overall, though, it's way less complicated than any k8s (or k8s variant) setup. It's also nice to have everything integrated into systemd and journald instead of being split in two places.
drivenextfunc · 3h ago
I share the author's sentiment completely. At my day job, I manage multiple Kubernetes clusters running dozens of microservices with relative ease. However, for my hobby projects—which generate no revenue and thus have minimal budgets—I find myself in a frustrating position: desperately wanting to use Kubernetes but unable to due to its resource requirements. Kubernetes is simply too resource-intensive to run on a $10/month VPS with just 1 shared vCPU and 2GB of RAM.
This limitation creates numerous headaches. Instead of Deployments, I'm stuck with manual docker compose up/down commands over SSH. Rather than using Ingress, I have to rely on Traefik's container discovery functionality. Recently, I even wrote a small script to manage crontab idempotently because I can't use CronJobs. I'm constantly reinventing solutions to problems that Kubernetes already solves—just less efficiently.
What I really wish for is a lightweight alternative offering a Kubernetes-compatible API that runs well on inexpensive VPS instances. The gap between enterprise-grade container orchestration and affordable hobby hosting remains frustratingly wide.
I'm laughing because I clicked your link thinking I agreed and had posted similar things and it's my comment.
Still on k3s, still love it.
My cluster is currently hosting 94 pods across 55 deployments. Using 500m cpu (half a core) average, spiking to 3cores under moderate load, and 25gb ram. Biggest ram hog is Jellyfin (which appears to have a slow leak, and gets restarted when it hits 16gb, although it's currently streaming to 5 family members).
The cluster is exclusively recycled old hardware (4 machines), mostly old gaming machines. The most recent is 5 years old, the oldest is nearing 15 years old.
The nodes are bare Arch linux installs - which are wonderfully slim, easy to configure, and light on resources.
It burns 450Watts on average, which is higher than I'd like, but mostly because I have jellyfin and whisper/willow (self hosted home automation via voice control) as GPU accelerated loads - so I'm running an old nvidia 1060 and 2080.
Everything is plain old yaml, I explicitly avoid absolutely anything more complicated (including things like helm and kustomize - with very few exceptions) and it's... wonderful.
It's by far the least amount of "dev-ops" I've had to do for self hosting. Things work, it's simple, spinning up new service is a new folder and 3 new yaml files (0-namespace.yaml, 1-deployment.yaml, 2-ingress.yaml) which are just copied and edited each time.
Any three machines can go down and the cluster stays up (metalLB is really, really cool - ARP/NDP announcements mean any machine can announce as the primary load balancer and take the configured IP). Sometimes services take a minute to reallocate (and jellyfin gets priority over willow if I lose a gpu, and can also deploy with cpu-only transcoding as a fallback), and I haven't tried to be clever getting 100% uptime because I mostly don't care. If I'm down for 3 minutes, it's not the end of the world. I have a couple of commercial services in there, but it's free hosting for family businesses, they can also afford to be down an hour or two a year.
Overall - I'm not going back. It's great. Strongly, STRONGLY recommend k3s over microk8s. Definitely don't want to go back to single machine wrangling. The learning curve is steeper for this... but man do I spend very little time thinking about it at this point.
I've streamed video from it as far away as literally the other side of the world (GA, USA -> Taiwan). Amazon/Google/Microsoft have everyone convinced you can't host things yourself. Even for tiny projects people default to VPS's on a cloud. It's a ripoff. Put an old laptop in your basement - faster machine for free. At GCP prices... I have 30k/year worth of cloud compute in my basement, because GCP is a god damned rip off. My costs are $32/month in power, and a network connection I already have to have, and it's replaced hundreds of dollars/month in subscription costs.
For personal use-cases... basement cloud is where it's at.
sciencesama · 34m ago
Do you have documentation somewhere, where you can share ?
risson · 10m ago
I do things somewhat similarly but still rely on Helm/customize/ArgoCD as it's what I know best. I don't have a documentation to offer, but I do have all of it publicly at https://gitlab.com/lama-corp/infra/infrastructure
It's probably a bit more involved than your OP's setup as I operate my own AS, but hopefully you'll find some interesting things in there.
mikepurvis · 3h ago
Or microk8s. I'm curious what it is about k8s that is sucking up all these resources. Surely the control plane is mostly idle when you aren't doing things with it?
mdaniel · 1h ago
There are 3 components to "the control plane" and realistically only one of them is what you meant by idle. The Node-local kubelet (that reports in the state of affairs and asks if there is any work) is a constantly active thing, as one would expect from such a polling setup. The etcd, or it's replacement, is constantly(?) firing off watch notifications or reconciliation notifications based on the inputs from the aforementioned kubelet updates. Only the actual kube-apiserver is conceptually idle as I'm not aware of any compute that it, itself, does only in response to requests made of it
Put another way, in my experience running clusters, in $(ps auwx) or its $(top) friend always show etcd or sqlite generating all of the "WHAT are you doing?!" and those also represent the actual risk to running kubernetes since the apiserver is mostly stateless[1]
1: but holy cow watch out for mTLS because cert expiry will ruin your day across all of the components
Seattle3503 · 2h ago
How hard is it to host a Postgres server on one node and access it from another?
rad_gruchalski · 1h ago
It’s Kubernetes, out of the box.
Alupis · 3h ago
> Kubernetes is simply too resource-intensive to run on a $10/month VPS with just 1 shared vCPU and 2GB of RAM
I hate sounding like an Oracle shill, but Oracle Cloud's Free Tier is hands-down the most generous. It can support running quite a bit, including a small k8s cluster[1]. Their k8s backplane service is also free.
They'll give you 4 x ARM64 cores and 24GB of ram for free. You can split this into 1-4 nodes, depending on what you want.
One thing to watch out for is that you pick your "home region" when you create your account. This cannot be changed later, and your "Always Free" instances can only be created in your home region (the non-free tier doesn't have that restriction).
So choose your home region carefully. Also, note that some regions have multiple availability domains (OCI-speak for availability zones) but some only have one AD. Though if you're only running one free instance then ADs don't really matter.
waveringana · 3h ago
the catch is: no commercial usage and half the time you try to spin up an instance itll tell you theres no room left
SOLAR_FIELDS · 3h ago
That limitation (spinning up an instance) only exists if you don't put a payment card in. If you put a payment card in, it goes away immediately. You don't have to actually pay anything, you can provision the always free resources, but obviously in this regard you have to ensure that you don't accidentally provision something with cost. I used terraform to make my little kube cluster on there and have not had a cost event at all in over 1.5 years. I think at one point I accidentally provisioned a volume or something and it cost me like one cent.
Alupis · 2h ago
> no commercial usage
I think that's if you are literally on their free tier, vs. having a billable account which doesn't accumulate enough charges to be billed.
Similar to the sibling comment - you add a credit card and set yourself up to be billed (which removes you from the "free tier"), but you are still granted the resources monthly for free. If you exceed your allocation, they bill the difference.
SOLAR_FIELDS · 1h ago
Honestly I’m surprised they even let you provision the resources without a payment card. Seems ripe for abuse
mdaniel · 56m ago
I would presume account sign up is a loss leader in order to get ~spam~ marketing leads, and that they don't accept mailinator domains
rfl890 · 1h ago
There are tons of horror stories about OCI's free tier (check r/oraclecloud on reddit, tl;dr: your account may get terminated at any moment and you will lose access to all data with no recovery options). I wouldn't suggest putting anything serious on it.
> I'm constantly reinventing solutions to problems that Kubernetes already solves—just less efficiently.
But you've already said yourself that the cost of using K8s is too high. In one sense, you're solving those solutions more efficiently, it just depends on the axis you use to measure things.
randallsquared · 1h ago
The original statement is ambiguous. I read it as "problems that k8s already solves -- but k8s is less efficient, so can't be used".
404mm · 3h ago
I found k3s to be a happy medium. It feels very lean and works well even on a Pi, and scales ok to a few node cluster if needed. You can even host the database on a remote mysql server, if local sqlite is too much IO.
pachevjoseph · 1h ago
I’ve been using https://www.coolify.io/ self hosted. It’s a good middle ground between full blown k8s and systemd services. I have a home lab where I host most of my hobby projects though. So take that into account. You can also use their cloud offering to connect to VPSs
nvarsj · 3h ago
Just do it like the olden days, use ansible or similar.
I have a couple dedicated servers I fully manage with ansible. It's docker compose on steroids. Use traefik and labeling to handle reverse proxy and tls certs in a generic way, with authelia as simple auth provider. There's a lot of example projects on github.
A weekend of setup and you have a pretty easy to manage system.
nicce · 3h ago
What is the advantage of traefik over oldschool Nginx?
c0balt · 1h ago
Traefik has some nice labeling for docker that allows you to colocate your reverse proxy config with your container definition. It's slightly more convenient than NGINX for that usecase with compose. It effectively saves you a dedicated vietualhost conf by setting some labels.
This obviously has some limits and becomes significantly less useful when one requires more complex proxy rules.
gonzo41 · 2h ago
There's very little advantage IMO. I've used both. I always end up back at Nginx. Traefik was just another configuration layer that got in the way of things.
czhu12 · 3h ago
This is exactly why I built https://canine.sh -- basically for indie hackers to have the full experience of Heroku with the power and portability of Kubernetes.
For single server setups, it uses k3s, which takes up ~200MB of memory on your host machine. Its not ideal, but the pain of trying to wrangle docker deployments, and the cheapness of hetzner made it worth it.
nullpoint420 · 1h ago
Have you tried nixOS? I feel like it solves the functional aspect you're looking for.
vrosas · 2h ago
Why not just use something like Cloud Run? If you're only running a microVM deploying it there will probably be at or near free.
singron · 2h ago
NixOS works really well for me. I used to write these kinds of idempotent scripts too but they are usually irrelevant in NixOS where that's the default behavior.
kartikarti · 3h ago
Virtual Kubelet is one step forward towards Kubernetes as an API
This was touched on at the end of the article, but the author hadn't yet explored it. Thanks for the link.
> Of course, as my luck would have it, Podman integration with systemd appears to be deprecated already and they're now talking about defining containers in "Quadlet" files, whatever those are. I guess that will be something to learn some other time.
rsolva · 3h ago
This us the way! Quadlets is such a nice way to run containers, really a set and forget experience. No need to install extra packages, at least on Fedora or Rocky Linux. I should do a write up of this some time...
overtone1000 · 3h ago
I came to the comments to make sure someone mentioned quadlets. Just last week, I migrated my home server from docker compose to rootless podman quadlets. The transition was challenging, but I am very happy with the result.
sureglymop · 2h ago
Seems very cool but can it do all one can do with compose? In other words, declare networks, multiple services, volumes, config(maps) and labels for e.g. traefik all in one single file?
To me that's why compose is neat. It's simple. Works well with rootless podman also.
0xC0ncord · 2h ago
You can if you convert your docker-compose.yaml into Kubernetes YAML and deploy that as a quadlet with a .kube extension.
mattbillenstein · 2h ago
I never moved to containers and seeing the churn the community has went through with all of this complicated container tooling, I'm happy orchestrating small-scale systems with supervisord and saltstack-like chatops deployments - it's just stupid simple by comparison and provides parity between dev and prod environments that's nice.
try the built-in systemd containers - via nspawn. Underrated tool!
candiddevmike · 1h ago
Too many gaps around image management. It seems like an unfinished feature that wasn't completely thought out IMO. Podman is what systemd-nspawns OCI interface should've become.
byrnedo · 4h ago
I created skate (https://github.com/skateco/skate) to be basically this but multihost and support k8s manifests. Under the hood it’s podman and systemd
teleforce · 1h ago
The article is more than one year old, systemd now even has specialized officially supported OS distro for immutable workflow namely ParticleOS [1],[2].
Harbormaster uses a YAML file to discover repositories, clones and updates them every so often, and runs the Docker Compose files they contain. It also keeps all state in a single directory, so you can easily back everything up. That's it.
It's by far the easiest and best tool for container orchestration I've come across, if all you need is a single server. I love how the entire config is declared in a repo, I love how all the state is in one directory, and I love how everything is just Compose files, nothing more complicated.
I know I'm tooting my own horn, I just love it so much.
The benefit here is that it is simple and also works on your development machine.
Of course if the side goal is to also do something fun and cool and learn, then Quadlet/k8s/systemd are great options too!
arjie · 3h ago
I also use systemd+podman. I manage the access into the machine via an nginx that reverse proxies the services. With quadlets things will probably be even better but right now I have a manual flow with `podman run` etc. because sometimes I just want to run on the host instead and this allows for me to incrementally move in.
sureglymop · 2h ago
I do this with traefik as the reverse proxy. To host something new, all I need to do is add a label to the new container for traefik to recognize. It's neat with a wildcard cert that traefik automatically renews. I've also heard good things about caddy, a similar alternative.
arjie · 1h ago
Yeah, I've heard that these new reverse proxies are great like that. I have to run certbot (which I do) and I should have created wildcard certs but I didn't. I use traefik on k3s and it's good there for other stuff.
zokier · 4h ago
Why on earth would you run services on a server with --user and then fiddle with lingering logins instead of just using the system service manager?
phoronixrly · 4h ago
I'll answer this for you. You want rootless podman because docker is the defacto standard way of packaging non-legacy software now including autoupdates. I know, sad... Podman still does not offer convenient and mature way for systemd to run it with an unprivileged user. It is the only gripe I've had with this approach...
ggpsv · 1h ago
This is no longer true as of Podman 5 and Quadlet?
You can define rootless containers to run under systemd services as unprivileged users. You can use machinectl to login as said user and interact with systemctl.
jcgl · 1h ago
Quadlet debuted with Podman 4.4 iirc.
soraminazuki · 1h ago
It appears that systemd User= and DynamicUser= is incompatible with Podman so --user is being used as a replacement. Looks messy.
This is cool, but it doesn't address the redundancy/availability aspect of k8s, specifically, being able to re-schedule dead services when a node (inevitably) dies.
pphysch · 1h ago
I like to look at Kubernetes as "distributed systemd".
"What if I could define a systemd unit that managed a service across multiple nodes" leads naturally to something like k8s.
agreed, coreos pivoted to k8s almost immediately after releaseing fleet and didn't really get the chance to use and develop it much.
thebeardisred · 2h ago
Well, it's funny you mention that because I started working on a PoC of running vLLM atop Fleet this morning. :grin:
dullcrisp · 3h ago
I’m here just doing docker compose pull && docker compose down && docker compose up -d and it’s basically fine.
dorongrinstein · 1h ago
At https://controlplane.com we give you the power of Kubernetes without the toil of k8s. A line of code gets you a tls terminated endpoint that is geo routed to any cloud region and on-prem location. We created the Global Virtual Cloud that let's you run compute on any cloud, on premises hardware or vm's and any combination. I left vmware to start the company because the cognitive load on engineers was becoming ridiculous. Logs, metrics, tracing, service discovery, TLS, DNS, service mesh, network tunnels and much more - we made it easy. We do to the cloud what vmware did to hardware - you don't care what underlying cloud you're on. Yet you can use ANY backing service of AWS, GCP and Azure - as if they merged and your workloads are portable - they run unmodified anywhere and can consume any combination of services like RDS, Big Query, Cosmos db and any other. It is as if the cloud providers decided to merge and then lower your cost by 60-80%.
Check it out.
Doron
maxclark · 4h ago
I know some large AWS environments that run a variation of this
Autoscaling fleet - image starts, downloads container from registry and starts on instance
1:1 relationship between instance and container - and they’re running 4XLs
When you get past the initial horror it’s actually beautiful
kgeist · 1h ago
When a service is updated like this:
- is there downtime? (old service down, new service hasn't started yet)
- does it do health checks before directing traffic? (the process is up, but its HTTP service hasn't initialized yet)
- what if the new process fails to start, how do you rollback?
Or it's solved with nginx which sits in front of the containers? Or systemd has a builtin solution? Articles like this often omit such details. Or no one cares about occasional downtimes?
mattrighetti · 1h ago
Do you actually need the container at that point?
I host all of my hobby projects on a couple of raspi zeros using systemd alone, zero containers. Haven’t had a problem since when I started using it. Single binaries are super easy to setup and things rarely break, you have auto restart and launch at startup.
All of the binaries get generated on GitHub using Actions and when I need to update stuff I login using ssh and execute a script that uses a GitHub token to download and replace the binary, if something is not okay I also have a rollback script that switches things back to its previous setup. It’s as simple as it gets and it’s been my go-to for 2 years now.
VWWHFSfQ · 4h ago
We went back to just packaging debs and running them directly on ec2 instances with systemd. no more containers. Put the instances in an autoscaling group with an ALB. A simple ansible-pull installs the debs on-boot.
really raw-dogging it here but I got tired of endless json-inside-yaml-inside-hcl. ansible yaml is about all I want to deal with at this point.
secabeen · 3h ago
I also really like in this approach that if there is a bug in a common library that I use, all I have to do is `apt full-upgrade` and restart my running processes, and I am protected. No rebuilding anything, or figuring out how to update some library buried deep a container that I may (or may not) have created.
SvenL · 4h ago
Yes, I also have gone this route for a very simple application. Systemd was actually delightful, using a system assigned user account to run the service with the least amount of privileges is pretty cool. Also cgroup support does really make it nice to run many different services on one vps.
r3trohack3r · 2h ago
The number of human lifetimes wasted on the problem domain of "managing YAML at scale"...
on the resource part - try running k8s on Talos linux.
much less overhead.
TZubiri · 2h ago
Looking forward to the follow up "replacing systemd with init and bash scripts."
IAmNotACellist · 2h ago
That's the most disgusting sentence fragment I've ever heard. I wish it could be sent back in a localized wormhole and float across the table when Systemd was being voted on to become the next so-called init system.
Edit: Nevermind, I misunderstood the article from just the headline. But I'm keeping the comment as I find the reference funny
lstodd · 1h ago
was actually fun running crypto traders without all this container bullshit.
one service is one service. and so much simpler.
it helped of course that people writing them knew what they were doing.
lrvick · 3h ago
Or drop all brittle c code entirely and replace systemd with kubernetes: https://www.talos.dev/
weikju · 3h ago
Just replace the battle tested brittle C code with a brittle bespoke yaml mess!
sepositus · 2h ago
To suggest that Kubernetes doesn't fall under the scope of "battle tested" is a bit misleading. As much as systemd? Of course not. But it's not 2016 anymore and we have billions of collective operational hours with Kubernetes.
Just the other day I found a cluster I had inadvertently left running on my macBook using Kind. It literally had three weeks of uptime (running a full stack of services) and everything was still working, even with the system getting suspended repeatedly.
I even run my entire Voron 3D printer stack with podman-systemd so I can update and rollback all the components at once, although I'm looking at switching to mkosi and systemd-sysupdate and just update/rollback the entire disk image at once.
The main issues are: 1. A lot of people just distribute docker-compose files, so you have to convert it to systemd units. 2. A lot of docker images have a variety of complexities around user/privilege setup that you don't need with podman. Sometimes you need to do annoying userns idmapping, especially if a container refuses to run as root and/or switches to another user.
Overall, though, it's way less complicated than any k8s (or k8s variant) setup. It's also nice to have everything integrated into systemd and journald instead of being split in two places.
This limitation creates numerous headaches. Instead of Deployments, I'm stuck with manual docker compose up/down commands over SSH. Rather than using Ingress, I have to rely on Traefik's container discovery functionality. Recently, I even wrote a small script to manage crontab idempotently because I can't use CronJobs. I'm constantly reinventing solutions to problems that Kubernetes already solves—just less efficiently.
What I really wish for is a lightweight alternative offering a Kubernetes-compatible API that runs well on inexpensive VPS instances. The gap between enterprise-grade container orchestration and affordable hobby hosting remains frustratingly wide.
Still on k3s, still love it.
My cluster is currently hosting 94 pods across 55 deployments. Using 500m cpu (half a core) average, spiking to 3cores under moderate load, and 25gb ram. Biggest ram hog is Jellyfin (which appears to have a slow leak, and gets restarted when it hits 16gb, although it's currently streaming to 5 family members).
The cluster is exclusively recycled old hardware (4 machines), mostly old gaming machines. The most recent is 5 years old, the oldest is nearing 15 years old.
The nodes are bare Arch linux installs - which are wonderfully slim, easy to configure, and light on resources.
It burns 450Watts on average, which is higher than I'd like, but mostly because I have jellyfin and whisper/willow (self hosted home automation via voice control) as GPU accelerated loads - so I'm running an old nvidia 1060 and 2080.
Everything is plain old yaml, I explicitly avoid absolutely anything more complicated (including things like helm and kustomize - with very few exceptions) and it's... wonderful.
It's by far the least amount of "dev-ops" I've had to do for self hosting. Things work, it's simple, spinning up new service is a new folder and 3 new yaml files (0-namespace.yaml, 1-deployment.yaml, 2-ingress.yaml) which are just copied and edited each time.
Any three machines can go down and the cluster stays up (metalLB is really, really cool - ARP/NDP announcements mean any machine can announce as the primary load balancer and take the configured IP). Sometimes services take a minute to reallocate (and jellyfin gets priority over willow if I lose a gpu, and can also deploy with cpu-only transcoding as a fallback), and I haven't tried to be clever getting 100% uptime because I mostly don't care. If I'm down for 3 minutes, it's not the end of the world. I have a couple of commercial services in there, but it's free hosting for family businesses, they can also afford to be down an hour or two a year.
Overall - I'm not going back. It's great. Strongly, STRONGLY recommend k3s over microk8s. Definitely don't want to go back to single machine wrangling. The learning curve is steeper for this... but man do I spend very little time thinking about it at this point.
I've streamed video from it as far away as literally the other side of the world (GA, USA -> Taiwan). Amazon/Google/Microsoft have everyone convinced you can't host things yourself. Even for tiny projects people default to VPS's on a cloud. It's a ripoff. Put an old laptop in your basement - faster machine for free. At GCP prices... I have 30k/year worth of cloud compute in my basement, because GCP is a god damned rip off. My costs are $32/month in power, and a network connection I already have to have, and it's replaced hundreds of dollars/month in subscription costs.
For personal use-cases... basement cloud is where it's at.
Put another way, in my experience running clusters, in $(ps auwx) or its $(top) friend always show etcd or sqlite generating all of the "WHAT are you doing?!" and those also represent the actual risk to running kubernetes since the apiserver is mostly stateless[1]
1: but holy cow watch out for mTLS because cert expiry will ruin your day across all of the components
I hate sounding like an Oracle shill, but Oracle Cloud's Free Tier is hands-down the most generous. It can support running quite a bit, including a small k8s cluster[1]. Their k8s backplane service is also free.
They'll give you 4 x ARM64 cores and 24GB of ram for free. You can split this into 1-4 nodes, depending on what you want.
[1] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
So choose your home region carefully. Also, note that some regions have multiple availability domains (OCI-speak for availability zones) but some only have one AD. Though if you're only running one free instance then ADs don't really matter.
I think that's if you are literally on their free tier, vs. having a billable account which doesn't accumulate enough charges to be billed.
Similar to the sibling comment - you add a credit card and set yourself up to be billed (which removes you from the "free tier"), but you are still granted the resources monthly for free. If you exceed your allocation, they bill the difference.
But you've already said yourself that the cost of using K8s is too high. In one sense, you're solving those solutions more efficiently, it just depends on the axis you use to measure things.
I have a couple dedicated servers I fully manage with ansible. It's docker compose on steroids. Use traefik and labeling to handle reverse proxy and tls certs in a generic way, with authelia as simple auth provider. There's a lot of example projects on github.
A weekend of setup and you have a pretty easy to manage system.
One can read more here: https://doc.traefik.io/traefik/routing/providers/docker/
This obviously has some limits and becomes significantly less useful when one requires more complex proxy rules.
For single server setups, it uses k3s, which takes up ~200MB of memory on your host machine. Its not ideal, but the pain of trying to wrangle docker deployments, and the cheapness of hetzner made it worth it.
https://github.com/virtual-kubelet/virtual-kubelet
Or maybe look into Kamal?
Or use Digital Ocean app service. Got integration, cheap, just run a container. But get your postgres from a cheaper VC funded shop :)
> Of course, as my luck would have it, Podman integration with systemd appears to be deprecated already and they're now talking about defining containers in "Quadlet" files, whatever those are. I guess that will be something to learn some other time.
To me that's why compose is neat. It's simple. Works well with rootless podman also.
[1] ParticleOS:
https://github.com/systemd/particleos
[2] Systemd ParticleOS:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43649088
https://harbormaster.readthedocs.io/
Harbormaster uses a YAML file to discover repositories, clones and updates them every so often, and runs the Docker Compose files they contain. It also keeps all state in a single directory, so you can easily back everything up. That's it.
It's by far the easiest and best tool for container orchestration I've come across, if all you need is a single server. I love how the entire config is declared in a repo, I love how all the state is in one directory, and I love how everything is just Compose files, nothing more complicated.
I know I'm tooting my own horn, I just love it so much.
It's basically just this command once you have compose.yaml: `docker compose up -d --pull always`
And then the CI setup is this:
The benefit here is that it is simple and also works on your development machine.Of course if the side goal is to also do something fun and cool and learn, then Quadlet/k8s/systemd are great options too!
You can define rootless containers to run under systemd services as unprivileged users. You can use machinectl to login as said user and interact with systemctl.
https://github.com/containers/podman/discussions/20573
"What if I could define a systemd unit that managed a service across multiple nodes" leads naturally to something like k8s.
Check it out. Doron
Autoscaling fleet - image starts, downloads container from registry and starts on instance
1:1 relationship between instance and container - and they’re running 4XLs
When you get past the initial horror it’s actually beautiful
- is there downtime? (old service down, new service hasn't started yet)
- does it do health checks before directing traffic? (the process is up, but its HTTP service hasn't initialized yet)
- what if the new process fails to start, how do you rollback?
Or it's solved with nginx which sits in front of the containers? Or systemd has a builtin solution? Articles like this often omit such details. Or no one cares about occasional downtimes?
I host all of my hobby projects on a couple of raspi zeros using systemd alone, zero containers. Haven’t had a problem since when I started using it. Single binaries are super easy to setup and things rarely break, you have auto restart and launch at startup.
All of the binaries get generated on GitHub using Actions and when I need to update stuff I login using ssh and execute a script that uses a GitHub token to download and replace the binary, if something is not okay I also have a rollback script that switches things back to its previous setup. It’s as simple as it gets and it’s been my go-to for 2 years now.
really raw-dogging it here but I got tired of endless json-inside-yaml-inside-hcl. ansible yaml is about all I want to deal with at this point.
https://developer.hashicorp.com/nomad
Edit: Nevermind, I misunderstood the article from just the headline. But I'm keeping the comment as I find the reference funny
it helped of course that people writing them knew what they were doing.
Just the other day I found a cluster I had inadvertently left running on my macBook using Kind. It literally had three weeks of uptime (running a full stack of services) and everything was still working, even with the system getting suspended repeatedly.
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