I’ve been in the process of migrating a lot things back to kubernetes, and I’m debating whether I should have separate private and public clusters.

Some stuff I’ll keep out of kubernetes and leave in separate vms, like nextcloud/immich/etc. Basically anything I think would be more likely to have sensitive data in it.

I also have a few public-facing things like public websites, a matrix server, etc.

Right now I’m solving this by having two separate ingress controllers in one cluster - one for private stuff only available over a vpn, and one only available over public ips.

The main concern I’d have is reducing the blast radius if something gets compromised. But I also don’t know if I really want to maintain multiple personal clusters. I am using Omni+Talos for kubernetes, so it’s not too difficult to maintain two clusters. It would be more inefficient as far as resources go since some of the nodes are baremetal servers and others are only vms. I wouldn’t be able to share a large baremetal server anymore, unless I split it into vms.

What are y’all’s opinions on whether to keep everything in one cluster or not?

  • theroff@aussie.zoneEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    At work we use separate clusters for various things. We built an Ansible collection to manage the lot so it’s not too much overhead.

    For home use I skipped K8s and went to rootless Quadlet manifests. Each quadlet is in a separate non-root user with lingering enabled to reduce exposure from a container breakout.

    • anyhow2503@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      If I may ask: how practical is monitoring / administering rootless quadlets? I’m running rootless podman containers via systemd for home use, but splitting the single rootless user into multiple has proven to be quite the pain.

      • theroff@aussie.zoneEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        Yeah it is a bit of a pain. I currently only have a few users. Tooling-wise there are ways to tail the journals (if you’re using journalctl) and collate them but I haven’t gotten around to doing this myself yet.

    • alienscience@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Just to add to this point. I have been running a separate namespace for CI and it is possible to limit total CPU and memory use for each namespace. This saved me from having to run a VM. Everything (even junk) goes onto k8s isolated by separate namespaces.

      If limits and namespaces like this are interesting to you, the k8s resources to read up on are ResourceQuota and LimitRange.