Honestly, what can I say that hasn’t already been said about Acadia? It was absolutely gorgeous, and picking just a few hikes to fit in the time I had was quite the challenge. If you have the opportunity, definitely go visit!

If you google for things to do along I-91 in Vermont, one of the top things on the list will inevitably be Quechee Gorge Trail. The state park made for a convenient and affordable stop for the night, with direct access to the trail and easy access to the shops nearby. Heads up though, the trail from the campground down is pretty serious so if you aren’t a big hiker take the shortcut out to the road and join the trail at the bridge where things are much easier.

It’s been an adventure all its own to kick off this season of travel. I gave up my apartment as part of the kickoff, which required a lengthy and complex move of everything into storage. On top of that, in the middle of the move I had to take the RV back to the factory to get some long delayed repairs made.

Thankfully, with the help of my family and friends, I was able to get everything going and into good shape and it’s time to begin my travels.

The astute readers among you might recognize this post is a bit late for a year-end review. Unfortunately, part of owning a new RV is dealing with problems and my rig has been out of commission for about 8 weeks now due to a failure in the electrical system.

My K8S cluster has been pretty flaky, with lots of errors on the KubeAPI and Metrics Server going unavailable regularly. I was also frequently unable to get logs from my pods. Turns out I should've read the K0S documentation better.

Well, it's been a few days and now we want to check for updates on our host systems and be able to patch them. After all, we can't deploy workloads until we have reached some baseline operational maturity. While there are some cluster-native ways to orchestrate patching I'm still happy to have my legacy tooling (Ansible) do it as a slightly simpler workflow.

Perfect, we've got storage sorted out and now we can run real applications. Let's deploy monitoring to our cluster so we can see how it's performing and check that everything is working correctly. We'll be deploying the Prometheus Stack, as this is the most popular and best supported monitoring solution for Kubernetes. Any guesses how this starts?

Ok, now we have a problem. We haven't told Kubernetes where it can find storage for our apps. In this example, we're going to use NFS but there are loads of other options like OpenEBS and Gluster. I'm going to assume you've already configured your NFS server of choice, and you know the appropriate mount options.

Ok, we need an easy way to connect services running in our cluster to the external network. The method I chose is MetalLB, because it's a very simple and flexible way to expose services without relying on an external load balancer. MetalLB plays well with the CNI (Kube-Proxy) used by k0s, so we don't need to do anything special to prepare for the installation. I already have Helm installed on my administration system, so deploying MetalLB is really simple. First we need to add the repository to Helm.

Ok, we laid down a base operating system and now we need to get Kubernetes running on top. I selected the K0S distribution, for a balance of being a mostly standard Kubernetes stack and having some really easy tooling for deploying and maintaining the cluster.