// the find
hobby-kube/guide
Kubernetes clusters for the hobbyist.
A guide for running Kubernetes on budget cloud providers (Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Scaleway) without managed K8s services. Covers the full stack from WireGuard VPN networking and etcd clustering to ingress, TLS, and distributed storage with Rook/Ceph. Aimed at developers who want to run a real cluster for under €15/month rather than paying for EKS or GKE.
The WireGuard-first networking approach is the right call — it sidesteps the 'private network isn't actually private' problem that most hobbyist guides ignore entirely. External etcd setup is handled correctly with a proper three-node quorum rather than the single-node kubeadm default that will bite you when the master dies. The Terraform modules in the companion repo mean you can actually reproduce this rather than hand-typing commands. The security section is unusually honest about shared datacenter network risks.
Last meaningful update was 2023 and it pins Kubernetes 1.26 and containerd 1.6.15 — both significantly behind current. The single-master setup is an unacknowledged single point of failure; the guide waves at resilience but doesn't cover control-plane HA. Rook/Ceph is heavy for a three-node hobbyist cluster — the overhead and operational complexity are serious, and Longhorn would be a better fit here but isn't mentioned. The permissive RBAC section that grants cluster-admin to all service accounts is dangerous advice dressed up as a convenience.