I have my K3S cluster up and running, and I’m ready to deploy my first service. I’m going to start migrating one of the simplest services I have running in my current docker setup, the RSS reader Miniflux.

I’m going to use Helm charts through the process since k3s supports Helm out of the box, but for this first service there’s also some preparation to do. I’m missing the storage backend, a way to ingress traffic from the internet, a way to manage the certificates and the database. Also, I need to migrate my current data from one database to another, but those are postgresql databases so I guess a simple pg_dump/pg_restore or psql commands will do the trick.

I’ve finally started to play with K3S, a lightweight Kubernetes distribution. I have been reading about it for a while and I’m excited to see how it performs in my home lab. My services have been running in an Intel NUC running Docker container for some years now, but the plan is to migrate them to a k3s cluster of three NanoPC-T6 boards.

I was looking for a small form-factor and low power consumption solution, and the NanoPC-T6 seems to fit the bill. I know I’m going to stumble upon some limitations but I’m eager to see how it goes and the problems I find along the way.

My requirements are very simple: I want to run a small cluster with a few services, and I want to be able to access them from the internet and from my home. My current setup relies on Tailscale for VPN and Ingress for the services, so I’m going to try and replicate that in this new setup.