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Comment by NoZebra120vClip | Hacker News Reader

A couple of years ago, I was dabbling in the cloud at AWS, and I initially decided to run a MediaWiki server with its associated stack, such as MariaDB and Apache or something, on Debian. And I found a good Bitnami AMI to do it with.

But what I really wanted to do was to spin up Kubernetes and learn about microservices in some way. The techie guys I polled said I wouldn't need k8s at all for my use case and I should scrap trying to do k8s because it wouldn't do me any good. I'm still sort of miffed at that; I would've rather learned some Kubernetes in the first place rather than just become a petty sysadmin again, so a replacement project that actually did make use of k8s would've been helpful.

Anyway I chose to double down on my chosen career in the education industry, so I'm letting my sysadmin/DevOps skills lie fallow until retirement.

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I'm interested in Kubernetes the same way I'm interested in Erlang. I find distributed systems so much fun to reason about, and trying to understand certain implementation details and design choices shed a light on the reasoning of very smart people on very hard problems.

Now, would I want to deal with those technologies all day? Not really. I also like diesel electric locomotives, but I don't wanna run a fleet of them or run through their maintenance sheets.

Honestly, getting started with k8s is easy. Get started with minikube on local desktop. Once you get the feel for it, try configuring a multi-node cluster using k3s on DigitalOcean or Hetzner and eventually using managed AKS/EKS/GKE if you feel the need.

I was surprised when I setup k3d the first time, I had a multi-node cluster on my (4 year old) desktop and was able to deploy a multi-node service I wanted to test out without any problems. I would highly recommend k3d if you don't want to pay for cloud servers and don't actually need either high-availability or the CPU power of 3 servers. Also, your desktop is probably more powerful than any base-tier server.

What do you use for load balancing and ingress? Do you rely on service discovery in this setup? I always get stuck figuring out how to get traffic into the cluster properly while allowing for graceful fault tolerance.

I’ve had success with MetalLB to dynamically announce a single IP for the ingress controller but that feels a bit overkill for a simple lab setup.

Are you asking about my "clusters" or k3d?

For my clusters, they're all single-node and therefore not fault-tolerant clusters, so I don't worry about graceful fault tolerance. I just use nginx-ingress which opens a port on the node (via iptables, so don't expect `lsof` to help!). Then my router port-forwards so my home IP:80 eventually hits my NUC

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