K8s-Migration

Wherein I describe how I organize Helm charts and other k8s manifests. I’ve had this post laying around in my draft folder for a long long time. Mostly because I started writing it before I realized how useful it is to write posts very close to when something happens. The “something happens” in this case is the answer to the question “How to organize my Helm charts and other k8s manifests?”. I liked Helm fine enough when I looked at it. It’s pretty nice to get all necessary manifests to run an app, instead of having to write all of them myself. But the question then was: How to store which exact Helm charts I have installed, and in which version? And how/where to store the values.yaml files? And then, what about random manifests, like additional PriorityClasses? ...

Wherein I try to draw a conclusion about my migration to k8s. This is the final part of my k8s migration series. After a total of 26 posts, this will be the last one in the migration series. On the evening of April 13th, after one year, three months and 26 days, I set the final task of my k8s migration plan to “Done”. I made the first commits for the migration on December 19th 2023, shortly after starting my Christmas vacation that year. It was the addition of the first VMs, for the control plane nodes. I already did some experimentation in November, but I don’t count that as time spend for the migration. ...

Wherein I migrate my control plane to the Raspberry Pi 4 nodes it is intended to run on. This is part 26 of my k8s migration series. This one did not remotely go as well as I thought. Initially, I wasn’t even sure that this was going to be worth a blog post. But my own impatience and the slowly aging Pi 4 conspired to ensure I’ve got something to write about. ...

Wherein I migrate my HashiCorp Vault instance to the Kubernetes cluster. This is part 25 of my k8s migration series. Look at all this Yak wool. That’s how much it takes to migrate Vault from baremetal to a Kubernetes deployment. I’ve been going back and forth for quite a while, trying to decide what to do with my Vault instance. It’s the one piece of HashiCorp software I do not currently plan to get rid of. But there was a problem: My Vault, or rather the High Availability nature of it, relied on HashiCorp’s Consul and its DNS service discovery functionality. And while I did want to keep Vault, I did not want to keep Consul. And I also didn’t really want to introduce some other sort of method, like HAProxy. ...

Wherein I migrate the last remaining data off of my baremetal Ceph cluster and shut it down. This is part 24 of my k8s migration series. I set up my baremetal Ceph cluster back in March of 2021, driven by how much I liked the idea of large pools of disk I could use to provide S3 storage, Block devices and a POSIX compatible filesystem. Since then, it has served me rather well, and I’ve been using it to provide S3 buckets and volumes for my Nomad cluster. Given how happy I was with it, I also wanted to continue using it for my Kubernetes cluster. ...