I've been diving into Kubernetes by working with it on an EC2 VM, and I'm now looking to set up a home lab using my old PC, which has 24GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. I'm curious about how many nodes I should aim for to get the most out of this setup, and what kind of projects or applications I could run on it to really explore Kubernetes.
6 Answers
If you're looking for more nodes, consider getting small PCs like Intel NUCs. I personally use Raspberry Pis for my home lab and run various services including Home Assistant. It’s not the typical way to do it, but it's fun! Your old PC can store the state data for your cluster, so you can experiment freely.
Honestly, learning is my main goal with this!
You might want to install Proxmox and run 2 or 3 nodes for testing. It gives you a good environment to work with Kubernetes while keeping things manageable.
Are you aiming to learn or just use Kubernetes? I wouldn’t recommend running multiple nodes on a single host due to the extra operational overhead it brings, but that’s just my take.
I recently set up 3 K3S nodes on MicroOS and it’s working smoothly with kube-vip for load balancing. I also managed to get Traefik and cert-manager running. I tested a simple app and it went great! I'm looking to add Argo or Flux and the NFS-CSI driver soon. My plan is to host services like Jellyfin and some smaller projects from work. Just make sure the nodes are schedulable and you might want to explore a similar setup with Talos.
Just a heads up, it's actually K8s, not K8. But hey, great that you're jumping into it!
Haha, thanks for the correction!
This sounds like an awesome setup! I'm going to try it out soon.