Minecraft on Kubernetes

During the pandemic, my daughters and I have played a lot of Minecraft. With a decent server, it's easy to run multiple worlds in parallel to support different play styles (creative, survival) and moods.

The itzg minecraft helm charts have been great for this.

For each new world, it's been easy to create a persistent volume, check in a declarative definition of the configuration (including server flavor, version, mods, etc.) and have Kubernetes manage the lifecycle, including backups.

It's even possible to build a Grafana dashboard!

I've learned a lot from operating these.