Converting from Raspberry Pi's to K3s

I was running several Raspberry Pi's to do various jobs but have always wanted to get a better knowledge of running Kubernetes(since I run alot of managed containers at work) so I began the task of migrating most of my non hardware dependent work over to K3s several weeks ago.

I started off the process by doing some research on what hardware I would need to run a cluster and ended up buying 3 used Lenovo Mini desktops off of EBay.  Each desktop had 16 gig of memory and a 256 gig drive.  That's not alot of drive space but adequate for what I needed.  I considered buying 1 big machine and using Proxmox to create a bunch of virtual machines to be cluster-like but decided to go with 3 physically machines instead.

Once I had the machines setup with Ubuntu, I needed a way to easily manage them so I installed Cockpit on each one.  Once that was complete, it was time to install K3s.  I leveraged Techno Tim's ansible install here: https://github.com/techno-tim/k3s-ansible His install instructions made it very easy to get up and running.

After going through several more articles I decided to manage my ingress with Traefik and my storage with Longhorn.  After playing around with both of these projects for a couple of weeks now, I definitely made the right decision.  It is very easy to add more storage via Longhorn and new websites via Traefik.

I would say the toughest thing I've done so far is get the wildcard cert for my personal domain working.  I had my domain on google DNS but decided after having verification issues to move it to Cloudflare.  Once I got things working it's been smooth sailing with certs.