[Adoption]: Tyzbit's Experience with Kairos in a Serious Homelab

[tyzbit]

Person of contact's full name

Tyler Hawkins

GH username, LinkedIn, Slack, e-mail, other.

tyzbit on GitHub

Company or Organization Name (optional)

Personal Homelab

Link to your company or organization Name (optional)

https://tyzbit.blog

What is your project about?

I run a homelab with an assortment of apps such as NextCloud, GoToSocial, a few Discord bots I've personally written and much more. I love to test things in my homelab before showing a proof of concept at my job and Kairos is no exception - I've already done an "Innovation Session" through my job about Kairos in October 2023. Kairos has made administering my homelab so much easier and as one of the people responsible for EKS upgrades, I wish I was using Kairos at my job.

Your Story (optional but recommended. Stories can be very powerful!)

I'm part of the Home Operations Discord, formerly k8s@home. It's an enthusiast Discord mostly around running Kubernetes at home in our homelabs. I've been watching users there use Talos for years and have looked on with interest but the main reasons I never adopted it are:

• Managing the nodes only through the API is very forward-looking but ignores my real-world needs for the ability to get a shell on the system for troubleshooting, debugging and visibility. If I had telemetry like AWS X-Ray or New Relic insights, I wouldn't be so avoidant but I run a diverse set of workloads and I control the code for almost none of them.
• Talos is it's own single distribution and customizing it is not feasible. For example, I run Longhorn and Talos only just recently added support for it so I would have been forced to use a storage solution I didn't want to use until the maintainers supported my use case. With Kairos, almost anything is possible since I have full control over the OS, but still get the benefits of reproducible deploys and immutability.

Being able to select my preferred Linux base distro for Kairos and being able to install necessary software such as Bluetooth support for HomeAssistant gives me a lot of control and flexibility. The bundle functionality was easy to pick up and so I contributed a bundle to Kairos' community bundles for WeaveWork's Flux, which is a very popular GitOps tool. I even played around with the p2p functionality, which worked exactly as expected. While I don't have the restrictive needs of highly distributed end nodes, knowing that functionality exists and works is pretty amazing.

(Project/company artwork can be my GitHub profile picture, or you can leave it out. It was generated with Bing Image Creator so I have the rights to use it)

Improvements (optional)

From an outside perspective, the Kairos maintainers seem to spend a lot of time dealing with compatibility and backporting type issues, multiplied by every supported distro. I think this is inevitable for a project this ambitious, and I am ignorant of if or how it could be improved, but I think if there is better tooling or more modular and repeatable processes to automatically bring Kairos compatibility to distros, that would free the developers up to focus on user-requested features that will make Kairos attractive and convincing as a serious contender in the space to skeptical users and organizations. With that said, Kairos has covered an incredible amount of ground since inception and since I started using it, so that pace is not something I'm worried about - just part of my desire to see Kairos succeed.

Please check the following

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