This is a personal blog focused on computer software and hardware. Most
projects are implementing software and hardware for a homelab. What is a
homelab? I would say a homelab could be a single computer or dozens of
computers connected in a network. You can also integrate with computers
in the Cloud.
Kubernetes, also known as k8s, is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and managment of containerized applications. For more of an overview, take a look at a previous post getting started with a simple kubernetes environment. This post is looking at a tool to deploy a kubernetes cluster with multiple nodes and most importantly it can be used on physical computers, a virtual machine, or a cloud based virtual server. To get started, you need SSH access to systems that you want to use as kubernetes nodes and install ansible on your workstation.
My homelab has evolved quite a bit over time. After implementing a wiki, I have tracked servers and services deployed there. This blog will serve as a nice location to periodically record the state of the homelab.
The lab all started in 2016. After the first hardware failure (a z270 asus motherboard), the lab shrunk to one raspberry pi.
2016
homelab_2016
In 2018 I acquired some Dell Poweredge R510 servers. One of the mainboards died when I attempted to change the CPUs. The other Dell ran until late 2021 when it was powered off due to noise and power consumption.
Grafana Loki was introduced in a previous post. If you do not have grafana and loki, check out that post to get started. Today we will set up a grafana dashboard to explore log files that are collected by Loki. As mentioned in the previous post, logs are sent to grafana loki using an agent called promtail. This agent can securely forward logs over HTTPS so all log messages will be encrypted in transit.
There are a lot of kubernetes components to keep track of. Today I am looking at some tools to make kubernetes easier to manage. In the kubernetes post, I deployed the kubernetes web based dashboard using a built in command for minikube. Let’s look at how to deploy the dashboard into any kubernetes distribution.
Kubernetes dashboard
Requirements
In order to deploy the kubernetes dashboard, you need to have a cluster configured. If you do not, check out the previous post on how to install minikube and gain access to that cluster’s API.
Having a dashboard webpage that links to your web applications makes navigating homelab and cloud services easier. It is certainly possible to create a custom web app or web page but there is a great open-source project called Heimdall that not only serves as a homepage/dashboard but has API integrations to many applications used in a homelab. More web applications are added over time so if an app you use does not have an API integration currently, submit a request to the maintainers.
Terraform is perfect for managing resources in public cloud providers. If you are not familiar with terraform, check out a previous post about terraform in my homelab. I am doing spring cleaning right now, I want to move my public cloud resources from Amazon Web Services to Google Cloud Platform.
GCP allows for your VPC (your private network) to span any region in the world. AWS requires VPC networks to exist in certain geographic areas. The only things I use in the cloud are DNS and web applications, everything else is on my homelab hardware. GCP will be a bit less expensive to run my containers and the networking setup is less complex.
