Introduction For the longest time, I have been managing my K3s cluster directly from my laptop (favorite IDE of choice: K9s) either through the local network or Tailscale VPN. However, there are times when I just want to check on some of my services running in the cluster, straight from my phone without the hassle of bringing around my laptop. Therefore, I began searching for a web dashboard which I can access easily on my phone. ...
Introduction I have been running my homelab for more than half a year now and it seems like a good time to document my self-hosting journey thus far. This post will be the beginning of a multi-part series, covering the homelab at a high level before zooming in to greater details. Hardware At the time of writing this post, my homelab includes: 2 Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (4GB) with PoE+ HAT 1 Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB) 1 Synology DS920+ NAS with 2 Seagate Ironwolf 4TB hard drives 1 TP-Link TL-SG108PE switch 1 Linksys E9450 router ...
The challenge Deploy a solution for configuring Kubernetes “from the inside”. Install Crossplane, which is like Terraform but you manage the infra from inside Kubernetes, not from outside. Crossplane is an open source Kubernetes add-on that enables platform teams to assemble infrastructure from multiple vendors, and expose higher level self-service APIs for application teams to consume, without having to write any code. Initial thoughts I have used Terraform for more than a year now and to provision infrastructures using plain Kubernetes manifests is a very refreshing idea to me. I feel that Crossplane definitely benefits organizations that are already heavily invested in Kubernetes. Having a unified language to manage both infrastructures and applications makes a lot of sense especially if developers in your team are comfortable working with Kubernetes. This reduces the overhead of learning something completely new like Terraform. That said, Crossplane is still a relatively young project at the time of writing this. There aren’t as many providers and the managed resources under each of them are way lesser as compared to Terraform providers. ...