A few years back, shortly after acquiring my current beast of a desktop system, I set about exploring Kubernetes. It had a growing presence in my work, my day job, and I wanted to explore it more. Going overkill, of course, building a 6 node cluster – three controllers, three workers, plus an HAProxy load balancer – it didn’t take long for me to become intimidated at the scope of maintenance and fear of not knowing what could go wrong (and how I would fix it). In theory it was a great way to really dive in and force myself to learn aspects of the platform, which did happen, but the more I started to land personal and family projects into it the less I wanted to play/explore for fear of breaking things folks depended on. This was made evident when the certs expired one year after implementing it and it took me a few days to figure out what the hell was going on.
So, I’ve started a project of simplification, and along the way I’m getting more familiar with plain-old Docker. I’m moving the important stuff to simpler docker compose deployments versus the more complex (though admittedly much cooler) orchestrations I had put together using Helm. I still use Kubernetes at work (OpenShift), so it’s not like I’ll lose the knowledge, and what I’ve gained at home has helped me through several challenging deployments in the analytics group. I just need something that’s more straightforward, easier for a lone person to manage, quicker to document, and less stressful.
One thing I’ve learned today is how to migrate WordPress from one site to another. In short, it can be easy, but you need a plugin to do it. I was disappointed there wasn’t anything built-in to facilitate a migration from one platform/host to another, not even an Automatic provided plugin, but alas I was able to find a way to do it for free (more on that another time). One site down, a few more to go.
Truthfully, I’ll probably mess around with Kubernetes in the future, but more likely after I spend some time building out a process to automate a cluster build. Smaller clusters (2-4 nodes) and quick build/destroy, so I can truly mess and not worry about the time and effort to destroy and rebuild. Yeah, I’ve been digging into Ansible too, and definitely want to spend more time with that.
Oh, and a benefit of all this, moving away from virtualization on Windows Pro to xcp-ng. You really don’t realize how limited Hyper-V is until you see what else is out there. Definitely more to come on that.
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