k8s-clusters

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This repository contains the configuration, scripts, and other goodies for building and managing my kubernetes clusters (right now, that's just my home cluster). I share the source with you so you can make exactly the same mistakes as I do.

Setup

Setup the pre-commit hooks before you change anything!

pip install pre-commit
pre-commit install --install-hooks
pre-commit autoupdate

Provision Machines

Before we interact with the cluster, we have some manual work to do.

Manual Preparation

• Currently, my nodes are Arch Linux machines on bare metal
  • Nodes must be ready to be controlled via Ansible
    • Have python3 installed
    • Need to be ssh-able from a controller (my workstation)
      • curl -L files.lyte.dev/key.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
  • Nodes must support Longhorn: https://longhorn.io/docs/1.2.3/deploy/install/#installation-requirements
    • Nodes must be running on a host filesystem that supports file extents
    • Provisioning takes care of the rest

Automated Provisioning

• Setup Ansible on the controller (from ./ansible)
  • ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml --force
• Verify Ansible can reach hosts (from ./ansible)
  • ansible all -i inventory/hosts.yml --list-hosts
  • ansible all -i inventory/hosts.yml -m ping
• Use Ansible to build the cluster as configured on all nodes (from ./ansible)
  • ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts.yml ./build-k3s-cluster

And the cluster is up! If you want to interact with it from your controller, you can do this:

ansible -i ansible/inventory/hosts.yml $REMOTE_HOST -m fetch \
  -a "src=/etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml dest=./k3s-cluster-config.kubeconfig.yaml flat=yes"
# TODO: this did not work for me
# env KUBECONFIG="~/.kube/config:./k3s-cluster-config.kubeconfig.yaml" \
# kubectl config view --flatten | sed "s/127.0.0.1/$REMOTE_HOST/" > ~/.kube/new-config

• Copy the cluster information from the ./k3s-cluster-config.kubeconfig.yaml file into your existing ~/.kube/config (or just copy it there if it doesn't exist)
  • You will need to edit the host from localhost/127.0.0.1 to the correct host

Automated Teardown

ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts.yml ./nuke-k3s-cluster

Setting up Flux

• Install the flux CLI on a machine that can kubectl into the shiny, new cluster
  • paru -S flux-bin
  • or curl -s https://fluxcd.io/install.sh | sudo bash
  • https://fluxcd.io/docs/installation/
• Run the pre-flight check (you must have ~/.kube/config setup!)
  • flux check --pre
• Create the flux-system namespace
  • kubectl create namespace flux-system --dry-run=client -o yaml | kubectl apply -f -
• Add the sops-age encryption key to the namespace

  pass home-k8s-cluster | grep age-secret-key | awk '{printf $2}' | \
    kubectl --namespace flux-system create secret generic sops-age \
    --from-file=age.agekey=/dev/stdin
  

• Install Flux (note the fish-isms here, so you may need to translate to bash-isms)

  flux bootstrap git --url=(git remote get-url origin) --branch=master \
    --path=./cluster/home --private-key-file=$HOME/.ssh/flux-k8s-clusters
  

Troubleshooting

If you screw something up here, here are some things you can do:

• flux uninstall will nuke flux from the cluster so you can retry from the beginning of this section
• If you get something like sync path configuration ... would overwrite path ... of existing Kustomization, you can edit the path: ... field in the flux-system/gotk-sync.yaml file in whatever you're passing as --path, commit, and try the bootstrap again
• You can pretty easily nuke the entire cluster and start from scratch as a last resort?

To Do & Status

• How am I going to handle highly-available storage?
• cert-manager with CloudFlare?
• external-dns with CloudFlare?
• I still need to figure out my overall cluster structure
  • Since my goal is to have full redundancy, I believe I need at least 2 control plane nodes, which since I need an odd number means 3 control plane nodes, and at least 2 worker nodes. This means 5 nodes total. I should be able to use some of my rpi4s in the cluster, probably as control plane nodes.
  • Where/how is storage attached?
• I need to figure out a migration plan from my current Netlify + Custom DDNS + Docker Compose setup
  • I should be able to do something like the following:
    • Setup all applications on the cluster using some dummy domain
    • Make sure everything works with the dummy domain
    • Change dummy domain to real domain
    • Change domain's nameserver to cloudflare
    • Should be all set!
• I want to look into Talos/Sidero + PXEBoot, since that could remove a lot of the ansible stuff?
• k3s has a decent amount of magic AFAICT, so I'd like to learn more about it and all its components so I better understand what my system is actually doing