„Alles kann warten, nur die Zeit nicht“

Everything can wait, only time doesn’t

This is how the Lambda Zen Temple in Glarus received me a few years ago (heck, has it been 8 years?) for a very warm (in winter!) and familiar supper, and it is one of those phrases that has stuck with me.

Indeed time flies, and by now it’s been about two decades since I started being a Sysadmin in one fashion or another.

In all that time, today happens to be the first time since then that I notice it is System Administrator Appreciation Day, on the actual day, and not several weeks after it has passed :-D.

It is also a day in which my lack of focus is “driving” (aka: helping me stomp through the day), so it’s been a busy day, in a weird way. Let’s see how.

The Fediverse is a wonderful place, and the #FreeBSD community over there is rather active :-).

Justine Smithies is one those people with whom we have had multiple constructive interactions, and she has made lovely contributions to FreeBSD’s community, starting with her enthusiasm!

Recently, she’s been toying around with maomao, a Wayland compositor.

And I promised to create a port if she committed to keeping it up to date (neat trick to get new contributors!)

Let’s document both that process, and how she can keep those patches coming in to the ports tree!

As part of trying out Kubernetes, we are going to set up etcd!

etcd is a “distributed reliable key-value store for the most critical data of a distributed system “

This is where Kubernetes state lives, given how important that is and how it seems to make sense to run it separated from the Kubernetes cluster for High Availability, we will be doing just that, using WMF’s etcd guide as inspiration for decisions that are important.

As part of trying out Kubernetes: planning, we are going to set up the network and VMs!

Quick reminder that this will be virtualised Linux on a FreeBSD physical host. This part is FreeBSD-specific.

Kubernetes turned 9 years old a couple months ago, so it’s about time I took a more serious look at it.

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management.

I have followed its development somewhat closely and kept up with the concepts and architecture, even if I haven’t jumped to actually using it.

First it was due to waiting for things to get stable, then I decided to let the hype wear off.

Now, hype hasn’t worn off, but it is at least a topic treated with some level of nuance: Kubernetes is great, but it comes with some complexity; complexity that is not necessary in many cases. And so we have to make sure that the benefits actually outweigh the overhead for our particular use-case.

As that point nears and I have some days off, I jump in at learning the best way I know how to: by actually doing things and, this time around, by writing them down for future reference / to better ask for clarification.

Let’s create a “High Availability Kubernetes cluster”! (I guess we’ll [re]define what HA means here a couple times while doing the deed)

Note I do this from a FreeBSD laptop, against a FreeBSD physical host, but the actual Control Plane and Nodes will be running on bhyve Virtual Machines running Linux in that remote FreeBSD physical host. Should not be too relevant, it just makes networking easier =D (debatable, yes).

This will likely take several posts :-).