Old (sysad)man yells at cloud: Using provisioning software is not the "Hard Way".

Does bring back memories of working with Docker in the early days though.

Yea, I used some bash scripts to manage ~250 rack mounted servers running Linux with a bunch of custom kernel shit. I don’t even remember everything it did but they specifically couldn’t use virtualization with this system due to latency and only the software included with the OS distribution was allowed so no Ansible or anything.

> only the software included with the OS distribution was allowed so no Ansible or anything

IIRC, Ansible, unlike Puppet or Salt, didn't require anything particular provisioned on the server - just old good SSH.

Yea, we were only allowed the tools on the ISO of one specific distribution even for the workstations! It was a secure closed network for testing stuff. My scripts were probably just a worse ansible. Occasionally I would threaten the servers aloud that I would “beat them with a stick” if they misbehaved, because I had a special USB stick which I would use to boot a mini distro that would format the server and pull the approved install image down and setup the network and stuff. It was easier to do that when something hung than diagnose it.

Right!

I starred this awhile back, it’s the really hard way imo, really great for learning: https://github.com/ghik/kubernetes-the-harder-way

Hrm, I have a repo like this for comparing Nomad and Agones.

I even have inspec profiles to test everything and it even supports windows (agones is teaching kubernetes to run gameservers so Windows and Gameservers is common)

Honestly I spent a good chunk of a month working on it, if there is any actual interest I could release it but I dont think anyone has the same problems I do.

raised-hand-here :)

Here you go buddy; https://gitlab.com/jmh/agones-nomad-research

thank you!

Thanks for sharing! It looks like the linked google docs are not public, though.

This is the only way for me. I generally have one repo for Terraform to provision the k8s nodes, wherever they may live, and another with Ansible to provision the k8s services and some basic operators like observability stack for example.

But now I'm moving more into using atomic server OS so I'm doing everything in one Terraform repo with ignition (or cloudinit).

getting kubernetes up and running is crazy easy these days, but this is still THE way to learn Kubernetes inside out. i wouldn't recommend doing this for production though unless you want to manage k8s as your day job.

Kubernetes is always the hard way.

Or the expensive way, which is also the hard way.