homelab

Setting up Longhorn on a Raspberry Pi k3s cluster

Introduction My article on setting up a Ceph cluster with Rook on a Raspberry Pi k3s cluster turned out to be my most popular post. That’s not surprising, considering the process involves several steps and often requires patience and digging through related GitHub issues for troubleshooting. While Rook can be a solid choice for administrators familiar with managing Ceph storage clusters, it does come with a steep learning curve and considerable complexity. As an operator, Rook wraps around Ceph, automating many of the intricate tasks that cluster admins previously handled manually. One drawback of using Ceph is its requirement for unformatted partitions or devices on each node, which makes it less suitable for setups with tighter resource constraints.

Sunday, April 20, 2025 Read

Setting up a Ceph cluster with Rook on a Raspberry Pi k3s cluster

Introduction Due to the low IOPS of the micro SD cards, I decided to switch to external NVMe SSDs. In addition to the boot partition, each SSD has a large unused partition that I am utilizing to provision Kubernetes Persistent Volumes through a Rook Ceph Cluster. I chose this approach as a learning opportunity to explore Kubernetes-native storage. Since my cluster isn’t running any critical applications, I don’t need data replication, so Local Persistent Volumes would have been sufficient. However, in production environments, the following requirements often arise:

Friday, November 22, 2024 Read

Setting up a homelab on a RaspberryPi cluster with k3s

Introduction Since beginning my career in DevOps, my focus has largely been on cloud services (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS), and I haven’t had the opportunity to engage deeply with traditional sysadmin tasks or server administration. I believe that setting up my own homelab and hosting applications will enhance my DevOps skills. This hands-on experience will allow me to explore storage, networking, and container orchestration at a more fundamental level, beyond the cloud abstractions I am used to. This article will highlight the hardware I chose for my homelab and the configuration needed to deploy k3s on a RaspberryPi cluster.

Tuesday, October 15, 2024 Read