Kubernetes on Guix

Kubernetes on Guix

[Michael Dahlberg]

I'm still a bit new to Guix but not to systems administration and devops. I'd like to try running a Kubernetes cluster on bare metal systems running Guix. I don't think there should be too many gotcha's other than the lack of the systemd init system, especially if I want to install the basic elements of Kubernetes outsides of the Guix package management system .. which I'd rather not do. This gets me to my question: is Guix an appropriate environment to run a Kubernetes cluster and if so do you have any recommendations?

Thanks,
Mike

Re: Kubernetes on Guix

[Thomas Ieong]

Hey,

> is Guix an appropriate environment to run a Kubernetes
> cluster and if so do you have any recommendations?

I'm afraid that it isn't the case atleast for now, Kubernetes is not
packaged in Guix and I doubt that it will ever be, for two reasons:

1. Our Golang importer still needs some improvement and our Golang
ecosystem isn't in a great shape either, lot of outdated packages just
look at docker still in 20.3 version while upstream is at 26.x something

2. Kubernetes as a project just moves too fast, there is just not enough
manpower here to keep up with the pace. IIRC they struggles with this in
the debian world too:  https://lwn.net/Articles/835599/

Then even if you manage to properly package it, you'd need to define lot of
services definitions and config to integrate it and that's a lot of work.

If you still want to experiment here's a config from someone attempting
something similar:

https://codeberg.org/allana/guix-system/src/branch/main/allana/packages/kubernetes.scm

Re: Kubernetes on Guix

[Oleg Pykhalov]

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Hi Michael,

Michael Dahlberg <dahlberg@recursoft.org> writes:

> I'm still a bit new to Guix but not to systems administration and devops. I'd
> like to try running a Kubernetes cluster on bare metal systems running Guix. I
> don't think there should be too many gotcha's other than the lack of the
> systemd init system, especially if I want to install the basic elements of
> Kubernetes outsides of the Guix package management system .. which I'd rather
> not do. This gets me to my question: is Guix an appropriate environment to run
> a Kubernetes cluster and if so do you have any recommendations?

I have no problems with running Kubernetes on my Guix Systems, but you
need a knowledge of managing it's core components, because you probably
cannot relly of Kubernetes components deploy tools which most of the
time support only specific operating systems. In short you need:

- containerd
- kubelet with static pods
  - /etc/kubernetes/manifests/etcd.yaml
  - /etc/kubernetes/manifests/kube-apiserver.yaml
  - /etc/kubernetes/manifests/kube-controller-manager.yaml
  - /etc/kubernetes/manifests/kube-scheduler.yaml

you can take an example of config in my git repository, but it's kinda
dirty and probably you should do everything from scratch yourself
https://github.com/kitnil/dotfiles/


Regards,
Oleg.

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Re: Kubernetes on Guix

[Felix Lechner via]

Hi Mike,

On Mon, Jul 15 2024, Michael Dahlberg wrote:

> is Guix an appropriate environment to run a Kubernetes cluster

As a meta-summary, it's probably one area where you could use your
considerable experience in system administration to help improve Guix.

Most of us are working hard to make Guix competitive.

From my experience, software runs a lot more stable in GNU Guix than in
other operating systems---once you figure out how to get it going.  My
ten-year old son just said the same thing last week.

Kind regards
Felix

Re: Kubernetes on Guix

[Christoph Buck]

"Thomas Ieong" <th.ieong@free.fr> writes:

> Hey,

Hi Thomas!

> I'm afraid that it isn't the case atleast for now, Kubernetes is not
> packaged in Guix and I doubt that it will ever be, for two reasons:
>
> 1. Our Golang importer still needs some improvement and our Golang
> ecosystem isn't in a great shape either, lot of outdated packages just
> look at docker still in 20.3 version while upstream is at 26.x something
>
> 2. Kubernetes as a project just moves too fast, there is just not enough
> manpower here to keep up with the pace. IIRC they struggles with this in
> the debian world too:  https://lwn.net/Articles/835599/
>
> Then even if you manage to properly package it, you'd need to define lot of
> services definitions and config to integrate it and that's a lot of
> work.

Maybe k3s[1], a lightweight kubernetes distribution, is an alternative
where packaging for guix is simpler?  Currently i use it in my homelab
running NixOs. In fact for me that is the most missed package in guix
ecosystem. NixOs allows me to delaratively describe a k3s node system,
spun it up on a fresh system and join it to my cluster within a matter
of few minutes.

I tried porting the nix package description ([2]) to guix, but the lack
of expierence with guix and the hard dependency on systemd was a show
stopper for me. Is it even possible to run k3s without systemd on guix?



[1] https://k3s.io/
[2] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/applications/networking/cluster/k3s/builder.nix




-- 
Best regards

Christoph