Hi! I’m starting out with self-hosting. I was setting up Grafana for system monitoring of my mini-PC. However, I ran into issue of keeping credentials secure in my Docker Compose file. I ended up using Docker Swarm since it was the path of least resistance. I’ve managed to set up Grafana/Prometheus/Node stack and it’s working well.

However, before continuing with Docker Swarm, I want to check if this is a good idea or will I potentially dig myself into a corner? Some of the options I’ve found while searching:

  • Continue with Docker Swarm and look into automation of stack/swarm in future

    • Ansible playbook has plugins for Docker Swarm.

  • Self-hosted vault: I want to avoid hosting my own secret/password manager at the moment.

  • Kubernetes (k8s / k3s) - I don’t wanna 😭

    • More seriously, I’m actually learning this for work but don’t see the point of implementing it at home. The extra overhead doesn’t seem worth it for a single node cluster.

  • Live dangerously - Store crdentials in plaintext. Also use admin as password for everything

Edit: Most of the services I’m planning on hosting will likely be a single replica service.

  • farcallerEnglish
    9·
    3 days ago

    I run k3s in my homelab as a single node cluster. I’m very familiar with kubernetes in general, so it’s just easier for me to reason with a control plane.

    Some of the benefits I find useful:

    • ArgoCD set to fire and forget will automatically update software versions as they happen. I use nix to lower the burden of maintaining my chart forks. Sometimes they break, but
    • VictoriaMetrics easily collects all the metrics from everything in the cluster with very little manual tinkering, so I am notified when things break, and
    • zfs-localpv provides in-cluster management for data snapshots, so when things do break I can easily roll back to a known good state.

    k3s is, of course, a memory hog, I’d estimate it and cilium (my CNS of choice) eat up about 2Gb ram and a bit under one core. It’s something you can tune to some extent, though. But then, I can easily do pod routing via VPN and create services that will automatically get a public IP from my endless IPv6 pool and get that address assigned a DNS name in like 10 lines of Yaml.