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Building the Home Lab Kubernetes Playground Blog Series

Hi Everyone, I wanted to start sharing some of the content and learning paths I have been taking to get a better grasp on Kubernetes and Cloud Native technologies. 

 

 

First of all I am going to be putting my learning and findings on this page as I continue to navigate these new technologies. 

 

And then I will keep adding if possible to this post with the latest blog posts. 

 

Part 1 - Choosing your platform 

Part 2 - Setting up your Kubernetes cluster 

Part 3 - Playing with stateless workloads

Part 4 - Setting up dynamic shared storage

Part 5 - Helm & MinIO

Part 6 - Context is Important

Part 7 - Load Balancing your Kubernetes Home Lab with MetalLB

Part 8 – Deploying KubeApps the visual marketplace for all your Kubernetes Apps

Part 9 – A Mission Critial App - Pacman

Part 10 – Backups in a Kubernetes world

I would love to get your feedback useful links to add or things we should share with the community. 

18 comments

Rick Vanover
Userlevel 7
Badge +10

Nice one CadeZilla

Twitter @RickVanover | Email: rick.vanover@veeam.com
Geoff Burke
Userlevel 7
Badge +22

This is exactly the type of thing that is needed to help the huge number of Newbies out there.

If not a secret what CNI (Container Network Interface, i.e. for the pod networking) did you end up using?

Great Job Michael!

VMCA2024, VMCE2023, CKA, CKAD, KCNA, LFCS, PCA,TARS
Chris.Childerhose
Userlevel 7
Badge +21

Always wanted to learn more about Kubernetes so will start here.  Nice job Michael.

Chris Childerhose - VMCA2024 | VMCE2023 | Veeam Vanguard 7* | Veeam Legend 4* | vExpert 5* | VCAP-DCV/VCP-DCV | Object First Ace | Cisco Champion | Twitter: @cchilderhose | Blog Site – https://just-virtualization.tech
michaelcade
Userlevel 7
Badge +6

This is exactly the type of thing that is needed to help the huge number of Newbies out there.

If not a secret what CNI (Container Network Interface, i.e. for the pod networking) did you end up using?

Great Job Michael!

In my walkthrough I am using “L2 networks and linux bridging” but I have also looked into “weave” and “Flannel” 

Would love to read some more on this though outside of the official K8 documentation about CNI, if you have some knowledge would love to hear it.  

Geoff Burke
Userlevel 7
Badge +22

This is exactly the type of thing that is needed to help the huge number of Newbies out there.

If not a secret what CNI (Container Network Interface, i.e. for the pod networking) did you end up using?

Great Job Michael!

In my walkthrough I am using “L2 networks and linux bridging” but I have also looked into “weave” and “Flannel” 

Would love to read some more on this though outside of the official K8 documentation about CNI, if you have some knowledge would love to hear it.  

I have been using Calico. They have free training and a free certification as well which is no walk in the park as I happily waffled my first attempt at their exam :). It gets pretty advanced so good to have some knowledge of network policies if you really want to leverage all of its capabilities. If you are using kubeadm to build your cluster and intend to use calico then use this pod cidr in the command which is what it expects by default 

kubeadm init --pod-network-cidr=192.168.0.0/16
VMCA2024, VMCE2023, CKA, CKAD, KCNA, LFCS, PCA,TARS
michaelcade
Userlevel 7
Badge +6

This is exactly the type of thing that is needed to help the huge number of Newbies out there.

If not a secret what CNI (Container Network Interface, i.e. for the pod networking) did you end up using?

Great Job Michael!

In my walkthrough I am using “L2 networks and linux bridging” but I have also looked into “weave” and “Flannel” 

Would love to read some more on this though outside of the official K8 documentation about CNI, if you have some knowledge would love to hear it.  

I have been using Calico. They have free training and a free certification as well which is no walk in the park as I happily waffled my first attempt at their exam :). It gets pretty advanced so good to have some knowledge of network policies if you really want to leverage all of its capabilities. If you are using kubeadm to build your cluster and intend to use calico then use this pod cidr in the command which is what it expects by default 

kubeadm init --pod-network-cidr=192.168.0.0/16

Nice Geoff, maybe a post touching on walking through where you found the learning and a small walkthrough of what a pod network is and how they work and why you need them? I would love to understand more. 

Geoff Burke
Userlevel 7
Badge +22

This is exactly the type of thing that is needed to help the huge number of Newbies out there.

If not a secret what CNI (Container Network Interface, i.e. for the pod networking) did you end up using?

Great Job Michael!

In my walkthrough I am using “L2 networks and linux bridging” but I have also looked into “weave” and “Flannel” 

Would love to read some more on this though outside of the official K8 documentation about CNI, if you have some knowledge would love to hear it.  

I have been using Calico. They have free training and a free certification as well which is no walk in the park as I happily waffled my first attempt at their exam :). It gets pretty advanced so good to have some knowledge of network policies if you really want to leverage all of its capabilities. If you are using kubeadm to build your cluster and intend to use calico then use this pod cidr in the command which is what it expects by default 

kubeadm init --pod-network-cidr=192.168.0.0/16

Nice Geoff, maybe a post touching on walking through where you found the learning and a small walkthrough of what a pod network is and how they work and why you need them? I would love to understand more. 

Sure thing! I will write something up and post here.  For the time being here is the link to Calico and the training. If you fail the exam (like I did the first time) you just need to email them to reset it for you. Again the course is free. https://academy.tigera.io/course/certified-calico-operator-level-1/

VMCA2024, VMCE2023, CKA, CKAD, KCNA, LFCS, PCA,TARS
Geoff Burke
Userlevel 7
Badge +22

I just realized that the Calico Certificate is a cat and the Legend one is a Lion, my cat here at home is thrilled :) 

 

VMCA2024, VMCE2023, CKA, CKAD, KCNA, LFCS, PCA,TARS
michaelcade
Userlevel 7
Badge +6

I have just added - Part 4 - Setting up dynamic shared storage 

michaelcade
Userlevel 7
Badge +6

This is exactly the type of thing that is needed to help the huge number of Newbies out there.

If not a secret what CNI (Container Network Interface, i.e. for the pod networking) did you end up using?

Great Job Michael!

I rechecked and I am using weave for the pod network. I might have to document how I found that as it’s not straight forward. 
 

 

gulzarshaikhveeam
Userlevel 6
Badge +1

Great work Mike!

Veeam Legend | CEH | Azure(Expert, Sec) | VMCE | VCP | VERITAS VIP | Sec+ | MCSE | ITIL | NCIE | NCDA | +++
michaelcade
Userlevel 7
Badge +6

Great work Mike!

Thanks, I am hoping when i keep adding these new posts they are being seen or maybe the post is just bouncing back up to the top. Either way hope people are seeing them. 

michaelcade
Userlevel 7
Badge +6

Not sure if people get notified when I add the new posts here but thought I would wait till the end of the series to comment which I think does get a notification. Appreciate that everyone is at different stages of their learning journey here, but hopefully, this helps give some hands-on experience and something to work along too in your own environments.

I am also going to keep maintaining the learning curve subpage on the site with resources that I find useful that maybe covers more of the theory of Kubernetes.

Geoff Burke
Userlevel 7
Badge +22

It did not seem to notify. I saw the notification on Linkedin and then came here. :) But when you made the comment then I got the email. I guess periodically we can comment on our own posts i.e. “please read” and everyone will get an email :).

 

VMCA2024, VMCE2023, CKA, CKAD, KCNA, LFCS, PCA,TARS
Geoff Burke
Userlevel 7
Badge +22

One part to underline is the Dashboard exposure. I know this can get very confusing. MetalLB had been setup before the K10 install in this series. If people just try to jump to the K10 install without setting up a load balancer and ingress controller, then they will either have to port forward or create a nodeport to access the dashboard and it can get tricky and not best practice for production. So it is better to go from A to Z in this series as every part is important, no shortcuts 🙂 .

Also on the wish list for us service providers would be an overview of the new Multi-Tenancy and Multi-Cluster features introduced in V3 :)

VMCA2024, VMCE2023, CKA, CKAD, KCNA, LFCS, PCA,TARS
michaelcade
Userlevel 7
Badge +6

One part to underline is the Dashboard exposure. I know this can get very confusing. MetalLB had been setup before the K10 install in this series. If people just try to jump to the K10 install without setting up a load balancer and ingress controller, then they will either have to port forward or create a nodeport to access the dashboard and it can get tricky and not best practice for production. So it is better to go from A to Z in this series as every part is important, no shortcuts 🙂 .

Also on the wish list for us service providers would be an overview of the new Multi-Tenancy and Multi-Cluster features introduced in V3 :)


That is a good point I do call out the node port and port forwarding option in the post but yes, I might need to make that clearer. I am going to concentrate on getting some posts out about AWS EKS, Microsoft AKS and Google Kubernetes Engine and maybe others before getting into the K10 stuff.

It is all part of the learning as well.

regnor
Userlevel 7
Badge +14

I'm going through Nigel Poulton's Pluralsight courses at the moment. They're interesting and fun to watch; thanks for the recommendation @michaelcade .

After looking at the basics I'll do the Kubernetes challenge from Kasten: https://www.kasten.io/kubecon/quick-start-kubernetes-challenge

Max M. | Systems Engineer @Veeam | VMCE/VMCA | VeeaMVP 2023 | former Legend & Vanguard
Shaokat
Userlevel 7
Badge +3

I am new in k8s. I think it will help me.

Shaokat

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