Aka, How I run Kubernetes on bare-metal at home.

A number of people run mini k8s clusters with Raspberry pis, and that’s great. What you may not be immediately aware of, is that they don’t run X86, which means most docker images on hub.docker.com won’t run on RPIs.

I could also have gone with a massive desktop, and VMs, but that goes against my minimalist lifestyle nowadays (all I have is a laptop, RPIs, and this thing).

I had been missing having a homelab, but my nomadic lifestyle kind of got in the way. I had seen HTPCs on taobao, and thought it would be cool to try. I sat on the idea, until this guy knocked it out the ballpark. Kudos to him, this is just copy-pasta.

tower

Part list

I decided to go w/ a 7 board stack. I didn’t want to waste one network port (eg, 8 port switch, 7 boards, and one uplink).

7 of all of these

Build things

Network things

4m of ethernet, I bought and got it cut to length locally
1x 1gbps switch, I bought it locally

The build

Quite frankly, you can just take a look at what Shayne did

Installation

Since I’ve already gone through Kubernetes that hard way a couple of times, I already had some ansible playbooks. I’ve since converted them to simply use KubeADM, because that’s the easiest thing.

I’ll probably push them to github at somepoint. They’re not earth shattering by any means, you’re not missing much.