You’ll love this update if you’re passionate about self-hosting NAS and have a foot in DevOps. OpenMediaVault 7 has introduced a game-changing feature for you: Kubernetes capabilities, all made possible by its new K3s-based plugin. Not familiar with K3s?
It is a lightweight distribution of Kubernetes designed to be simple and resource-efficient, making it ideal for edge computing and IoT devices. K3s targets small to medium deployments where the full capabilities of Kubernetes are desired, but the resource overhead of traditional Kubernetes is a concern. Now, back to the topic.
What Does OpenMediaVault’s K3s Plugin Offer?
The plugin comes with a pre-installed cert-manager for handling SSL certificates and Traefik in the role of Ingress controller, providing the reverse proxy functionality. This is essentially the standard K3s but with some really useful features included.
For example, persistent volumes (PV) will be auto-created for existing shared folders, making it easy to consume via persistent volume claims (PVC) during your deployments. There’s more โ OpenMediaVault’s K3s plugin has a built-in Kubernetes dashboard available at port 4443 by default.
The Load Balancer is running on port 8080 and 8443. You can use your local SSL certificates that are managed via the OpenMediaVault UI or let the cert-manager controller auto-create a self-signed certificate.
Moreover, the plugin uses the embedded etcd database, a distributed key-value store used as the backbone of Kubernetes for all cluster data, to have the ability to expand the single-node cluster with additional nodes.
But the good news doesn’t stop there. At a later stage, it is planned to provide an infrastructure that provides recipes that allow users to easily choose from a selection of applications they want to install. It is intended to serve as a template for easily installing applications without any great knowledge of Kubernetes.
These can then be based on Helm charts or, for example, simply on deployments. However, the aim is always to make the configuration as simple as possible for the user.
With everything said so far, we can conclude that OpenMediaVault emerges as the second free and open-source NAS platform to integrate Kubernetes-based container orchestration capabilities, following TrueNAS SCALE.
However, OpenMediaVault stands out by adopting a more straightforward approach in the face of almost pure K3s experience, providing developers with a familiar way to deploy applications. In comparison, TrueNAS SCALE opts for its own predefined user interface that tends to obscure the underlying processes from the developer, potentially restricting deployment options.
You can refer to the announcement for detailed information regarding the new OpenMediaVault’s K3s plugin. To install it, simply choose the “openmediavault-k8s” from the plugin page of the OpenMediaVault UI. For the most curious, check out this brief video showcasing the new plugin’s features here.
