Should I keep shared or separate k8s clusters? - eviltoast

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?

  • johntashOP
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    14 days ago

    Do you use garage for backups by any chance? I was wanting to deploy it in kubernetes, but one of my uses would be to back up volumes, and… that doesn’t really help me if the kubernetes cluster itself is broken somehow and I have to rebuild it.

    I kind of want to avoid a separate cluster for storage or even separate vms. I’m still thinking of deploying garage in k8s, and then just using rclone or something to copy the contents from garage s3 to my nas

    • farcaller@fstab.sh
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      14 days ago

      No. It’s my in-cluster storage that I only use for things that are easier to work with via S3 api, and I do backups outside of the k8s scope (it’s a bunch of various solutions that boil down to offsite zfs replication, basically). I’d suggest you to take a look at garage’s replication features if you want it to be durable.