K3s

Photon OS is an open-source minimalist Linux operating system from VMware, highly optimized for container workloads. Crazy fast How optimized is it, you ask? The minimal image weighs in at a tiny 470MiB, installs in 20 seconds, uses less than 1GiB of disk space after install, boots in 10 seconds (including the GRUB wait time!), and consumes less than 150MiB RAM after boot. It cannot get better than that (maybe VMware surprises me in the next release!). ...

Now that I have a Kubernetes cluster handy, I wanted to get my hands dirty by deploying my first application on it. What else is better than running an application I wrote myself to learn something to double up on the investment? If you want to read up on Short{Paste} , the application I wrote, you may read my blog post on it. App deployment I started by switching from Global to the Local cluster’s Default namespace/project. From the Workload tab, clicking on Deploy takes me to the deploy workload page. Here, I start by naming the workload as shortpaste and selecting the docker image adyanth/shortpaste. I leave the port mapping empty for now since I plan to add a layer 7 Ingress rather than a layer 4 NodePort or a Layer 4 load balancer. Under environment variables, I add what my app expects. Finally, for now, I let the scale default to 1 and hit Launch. ...

While my NUC homelab handled what I considered “production” workloads using docker and compose, I wanted to play around with and learn Kubernetes. I understood most of the bird’s eye view concepts like pods, deployments, and ingress, but without much hands-on, most of it was fleeting. So I decided to put my spare RAM and CPU on my desktop to good use by installing a complete K3s cluster. A good part of my research was provided concisely on an excellent guide by Tom . ...