Looking for a Heroku replacement, What I found was shocking!
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Date: December 4, 2023

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I've long hosted my personal blog as a static site on waylonwalker.com. It's
all markdown, converted to html, and shipped as is. It's been great, I've
moved it from GitHub Pages, to Netlify, tried Vercel for a minute, and have
landed on Cloudflare Pages. Each migration has not really been that
hard, it's just pointing ci to a different host after the site has built.

 [1]

## What about server side

Now the part that I have struggled with is how to cheaply host a server
rendered application that can just live on forever without me paying for it.
This is a harder problem as it costs more to keep servers spinning, memory, and
disk all ready for you to use at a moments notice.

## Honestly

 If you don't have a $1M problem to solve don't bother cause k8s will create a $1M problem for you.

## Let's jump on k3s

 [6]

I've never ran kubernetes myself, but after seeing it so many times in my
searches for a fly.io replacement, I decided to give it a shot. I chose k3s as
it seems like a nice balance of easy to setup, maintain, and feature complete
kubernetes service.

```bash
# install and start k3s
curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | sh -
# check to see if your nodes are started
sudo kubectl get nodes
```

My main hiccup so far was the machine I am running on runs a fairly new ubuntu
install with zfs on root, and it would not start the master node. Rather than
figuring out how to make zfs play nice I just pointed k3s to a drive that is
not zfs.

```bash
# manuallly
sudo k3s server -d /mnt/vault/.rancher/k3s
# without editing systemd service
sudo ln -s /mnt/vault/.rancher/k3s /var/lib/rancher/k3s
```

Next I needed to be able to completely manage my k3s cluster form my main machine while this one sits far away in a closet.

```bash
# from the server
sudo cp /etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml ~/.config/kube

# from my local machine
scp falcon@falcon:~/.config/kube/k3s.yaml ~/.config/kube/falcon-k3s.yaml
sudo cp /etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml /home/waylon/.config/kube
sudo chown -R waylon:waylon ~/.config/kube
export KUBECONFIG=~/.config/kube/k3s.yaml
```

## kompose

Since everything I was running prior was in docker compose, I found kompose.io
to be a fantastic tool to help me start converting my docker deployments into
kubernetes.

 [7]

## A Month Later

I started this post a month ago, and I am still enjoying k3s. For clarity, I
did have a bit of k8's experience going in, but zero experience running it by
myself. k3's seems to have made it pretty straightforward so far. My worst
issues have been with ingress. Docker registries were a bit of a pain due to
their large blob sizes, and a service I wanted to try to self host (sshx)
required grpc, which is not supported by cloudflare tunnels.

## TLDR

Don't believe everyone's pre-conceived notions about tech you have never tried.
Most of these things come from the echo chamber that is twitter anyways.
Create your own opinions by trying new things, learning for yourself, and
forming your own opnions.

References:
[1]: https://pages.cloudflare.com/
[2]: https://heroku.com
[3]: https://fly.io
[4]: https://www.cloudflare.com/products/tunnel/
[5]: https://kubernetes.io/
[6]: https://k3s.io/
[7]: https://kompose.io/