TLDR; Repo can be found here (Be warned, I’m at best, a hobbyist programmer and certainly not a software engineer in my day job)

I’ve been recently getting acquainted with Pulumi as an alternative to Terraform for managing my infrastructure. I decided to create a repo that would do a number of activities to stand up Rancher in a new K3s cluster, all managed by Pulumi in my vSphere Homelab, consisting of the following activities:

  • Provision three nodes from a VM Template.
  • Use cloud-init as a bootstrapping utility:
    • Install K3s on the first node, elected to initialise the cluster.
    • Leverage K3s’s Auto-Deploying Manifests feature to install Cert-Manager, Rancher and Metallb.
  • Join two additional nodes to the cluster to form a HA, embedded etcd cluster.

The Ingress Controller is exposed via a loadbalancer service type, leveraging Metallb.

After completion, Pulumi will output the IP address (needed to create a DNS record) and the specified URL:

tputs:
    Rancher IP (Set DNS): "172.16.10.167"
    Rancher url:        : "rancher.virtualthoughts.co.uk"

Why cloud-init ?

For this example, I wanted to have a zero-touch deployment model relative to the VM’s themselves – IE no SSH’ing directly to the nodes to remotely execute commands. cloud-init addresses these requirements by having a way to seed an instance with configuration data. This Pulumi script leverages this in two ways:

  1. To set the instance (and therefore host) name as part of metadata.yaml (which is subject to string replacement)
  2. To execute a command on boot that initialises the K3s cluster (Or join an existing cluster for subsequent nodes) as part of userdata.yaml
  3. To install cert-manager, rancher and metallb, also as part of userdata.yaml

Reflecting on Using Pulumi

Some of my observations thus far:

  • I really, really like having “proper” condition handling and looping. I never really liked repurposing count in Terraform as awkward condition handling.
  • Being able to leverage standard libraries from your everyday programming language makes it hugely flexible. An example of this was taking the cloud-init user and metadata and encoding it in base64 by using the encoding/base64 package.