In an effort to force myself to write might, I figured this would be a good place to start.
I've spent the last 8ish months working with k8s but managed k8s in Azure (with a little bit of AWS sprinkled in there). I did not set up the environment but have been tasked with maintaining it.
Coming into it, I didn't have much k8s experience aside from just doing a few tutorials, nothing production-related like what I inherited. I prefer to be thrown into the deep end of issues, though, so I am all in.
One thing that I felt like I was lacking was a core understanding of how to deploy apps into k8s. I could maintain existing apps, but I had not yet deployed anything new. I figured instead of running up the cloud bill deploying "test" applications in my work Azure account, I would start to set up my own in k3s.
I knew I wanted to deploy something on bare metal vs proxmox, but also did not want to have a large footprint. RPIs are kind of the go-to for that type of thing, but I don't really love dealing with ARM on Linux. Daily driving an Apple silicon mac, I've grown accustomed to everything just working on ARM, but that really isn't the way for Linux tasks.
This led me to look at the HP Elitedesk 705 G4. There's a ton of home lab YouTube videos that talk about this. It kinda hits everything I need, it's small, it's x86, and the one I bought came with a 256 GB SSD which is more than enough space I need.
Looking forward to getting this thing in the mail and standing up k3s on it. I'll have another post talking about setup and also what I am planning on doing with it. Right now it's looking like I am going to take a "GitOps" approach to configuring this. Really excited to get started.
-jmm