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.
That's a sick little rack.
Absolutely follow through with K8S, I recently did this and it's definitely worth it.
Running the workers in VMs is a little wasteful. But it's simplifies your hardware and your backups. My home lab version is 3 VMs in a Proxmox, The idea is, after it's built and working I can just move those VMs wholesale to other boxes. But realistically, adding workers to K8S is pretty brain dead simple, and draining and migrating the old worker nodes another skill you should be learning.
You could throw Debian on everything and deploy all your software through Ansible.
Don't lose sight of the goal. Get k8s running, push through longhorn, get some pods up in full tolerant mode, learn the networking, The engress the DNS, load balancing, proxies.
Exactly how you do it is less important than the act of doing it and learning kubectl.