add K8s shopping list

content/micro/thing-a-month-02-03.md

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+title = "a Kubernetes shopping list"
+date = 2024-02-08T06:12:53-06:00
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+I talked to a few people yesterday—it sounds like Kubernetes is where it's at. I really enjoyed Nomad back in the day, but it looks like I'd have to do a lot of roll-your-own, which kind of negates the benefit of operational simplicity for me.
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+That doesn't mean that I'm going to let simplicity go out the window. I looked around and found that Vultr will manage the control plane for free as long as you pay for the worker nodes. Doesn't look like it's highly-available, but I think that's OK for me for now.
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+So that leaves me with another shopping list to make: how do I run my stuff in Kubernetes?
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+- **CD and workload management:** I'll definitely use Argo CD for this. I used it in production at my last job and it was great.
+- **CI:** Like I mentioned yesterday, I've been wanting "real" CI for my personal stuff for a while. It looks like I have options: maybe Argo Workflows to stay in the family, but Tekton looks fine too. I know I said I'd rather avoid Jenkins but Jenkins X is apparently a rewrite? Interesting. I could also switch Git hosting to GitLab and use their runners.
+- **Routing and load balancing:** Bunch of good options. Traefik, the Nginx ingress controller, etc. I'm most interested in Istio, though. Seems like it has a gateway thing? Worth playing around with, anyway.
+- **Container storage:** Harbor graduated from the CNCF, so probably that if I don't get something built in with the Vultr cluster. But maybe Dragonfly, which does P2P stuff? Seems cool but I probably don't have the problem it solves.
+- **Misc:**
+	- A very experienced friend told me that cert-manager and external-dns were pretty much required, so I'm going to look into them.
+	- I've also used and loved Argo Rollouts, so that's going on the list. Not *required*, but they worked enough better for me than the core deployment object before and give you options for healthy rollouts so I'm going to use them for sure.
+	- I'll need to set up the CSI driver for Vultr too so that my persistent volumes will persist.
+	- How do secrets work in Kubernetes now? Do I need to run some component or is the builtin stuff usually good enough?
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+But, zooming out, I don't want to spend *too* much time on this. It's really easy to tweak and tweak and then never move on to the rest of what needs to happen.
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+So, guess I'll start grabbing stuff and shoving it into Terraform and see what happens!