Kubernetes: Azure Arc in a Talos Kubernetes Cluster

Azure Arc lets you connect a Kubernetes cluster to Azure and manage it from the portal, regardless of where it runs. In this case, a Talos cluster running on VMware at home, but it could be any Kubernetes cluster running anywhere. The cluster does not need any inbound ports open - the Arc agents run inside the cluster and maintain an outbound connection to Azure.

You also get MFA and Entra ID integration for authentication, and a live view of the cluster's resources in the portal.

Kubernetes: 3TB Less Storage, 80GB Less RAM, and More Features

After getting the Talos cluster running and ArgoCD wired up, the next thing to do was actually move workloads into it. That process ended up being a general cleanup as well - going through what was running, deciding what was still needed, and getting rid of the rest. The result was 3TB less storage consumed and 80GB less RAM allocated across the hosts, while actually running more services than before.

I have been running Kubernetes for a while, but still had a lot of the "one VM per service" mindset from before. Also wasn't really confident enough in Kubernetes to just move my workloads into it and delete the old VMs.

I also started moving VMs to Containers due to all the security vulnerabilites that have been popping up around Linux and other stuff lately. So it is either patching VMs more often or moving more into containers.

Kubernetes, Unifi, BGP and Talos in a Homelab

Last year I started looking into Kubernetes for the first time. There are a lot of options - k3s, k0s, Talos, kubeadm - and a lot of new terms to get your head around. I started with k3s, and have been running it for half a year. The last week I have been slowly but surely transitioning to Talos. A fully automated GitOps-driven cluster that I can wipe and rebuild from scratch in under an hour.

• Real LoadBalancer IPs with BGP peering to my Unifi UDM-PRO.
• Traefik with Gateway API for routing. cert-manager for TLS.
• External Secrets Operator with Azure Key Vault for secrets management.

The whole stack is in a single git repository and ArgoCD takes care of the syncing. But how did we get here?