So I have rebuilt my Production rack with very little in terms of an actual software plan.
I host mostly docker contained services (Forgejo, Ghost Blog, OpenWebUI, Outline) and I was previously hosting each one in their own Ubuntu Server VM on Proxmox thus defeating the purpose.
So I was going to run a VM on each of these Thinkcentres that worked as a Kubernetes Cluster and then ran everything on that. But that also feels silly since these PCs are already Clustered through Proxmox 9.
I was thinking about using LXC but part of the point of the Kubernetes cluster was to learn a new skill that might be useful in my career and I don't know how this will work with Cloudflared Tunnels which is my preferred means of exposing services to the internet.
I'm willing to take a class or follow a whole bunch of "how-to" videos, but I'm a little frazzled on my options. Any suggestions are welcome.
Wow, huge disagree on saltstack and chef being ahead of Ansible. I've used all 3 in production (and even Puppet) and watched Ansible absolutely surge onto the scene and displace everyone else in the enterprise space in a scant few years.
Ansible is just so much lower overhead and so much easier to understand and make changes to. It's dominating the configuration management space for a reason. And nearly all of the self hosted/homelab space is active in Ansible and have tons of well baked playbooks.
Popular isn't always better. See: Betamax/VHS, Blu-ray vs HDDVD, skype/MSSkype, everything vs Teams, everything vs Outlook, everything vs Azure. Ansible is accessible like DUPLO is accessible, man, and with the payola like Blu-ray got and the pressuring like what shot systemd into the frame, of course it would appeal to the C-suite.
Throwing a few-thousand at Ansible/AAP and the jagged edges pop out -- and we have a team of three that is dedicated to Nagios and AAP. And it's never not glacially slow -- orders of magnitude slower than absolutely everything.
Yeah, similar sized environments here too, but had good experiences with Ansible. Saw Chef struggle at even smaller scales. And Puppet. And Saltstack. But I've also seen all of them succeed too. Like most things it depends on how you run it. Nothing is a perfect solution. But I think Ansible has few game breaking tradeoffs for it's advantages.