I moved my homelab to Kubernetes. I just don’t see the use of single VPS’es. But I use the cluster as a training platform, so if I didn’t need Kubernetes in other parts of my life, I probably would have stuck with my NixOS VPS’es that all share config.
I use kubenix to manage the cluster, of course. ;-)
The two aren't mutually exclusive! I just finished porting my personal kubernetes cluster from running on Debian to running on NixOS. Now whenever I want to update the host OS on my kubernetes nodes, I just build a new bootable ISO from my Nix configs and upload it to my servers, swapping out the whole OS atomically. If anything goes wrong, I can swap back to my previous build. No more anxiety running `sudo apt-get upgrade` and hoping for the best.
But as the host OS I use Talos Linux, which itself is declarative and minimal. For small Kubernetes version upgrades, I upgrade the kubelet with an API command. When that isn't possible, I upload a new Talos image and swap them.
Since the nodes are cloud VMs, I will use a spare VM to add as a new node, and remove an old node. So I never run with fewer nodes. For my on-prem cluster, I will do the same with a spare hypervisor VM. It really helps ensure my nodes are ephemeral.
So NixOS, for now, has become a desktop/laptop operating system for me, and whenever I need an execution environment, e.g. a CI runner or a remote shell, I choose "something Nix-like" which is `nix` in a container without systemd.
I use kubenix to manage the cluster, of course. ;-)