/kubernetes
Posts touching kubernetes.
8 posts
- October 27, 2025 4 min
ArgoCD taught me that GitOps is about audit trails, not about git
After running ArgoCD in homelab and production for over a year, the real value is not deployment automation. It is the complete, immutable audit trail.
- /argocd
- /kubernetes
- /self-hosting
- /homelab
- /blog
- July 14, 2025 4 min
The Kubernetes upgrade that taught me release engineering is a leadership problem
A Kubernetes 1.34 upgrade stalled for six weeks not because of technical complexity, but because nobody owned the migration sequence.
- /kubernetes
- /engineering-leadership
- /ci-cd
- /learning
- June 23, 2025 4 min
Kubernetes 1.33 and the features that finally made me stop questioning container orchestration for small teams
Every six months someone says Kubernetes is overkill for a small team. Kubernetes 1.33 continued a trend of sane defaults and reduced overhead that invalidates that argument for teams deploying more than two services.
- /kubernetes
- /k3s
- /architecture
- /decision-making
- /blog
- May 5, 2025 4 min
Grafana, Loki, and Tempo: building an observability stack that a four-person team actually uses
Most observability guides assume a platform team. We do not have one. The hard part was not installation but building dashboards engineers actually check daily.
- /observability
- /kubernetes
- /architecture
- /self-hosting
- /blog
- April 7, 2025 5 min
ArgoCD and GitOps for a team of four: overkill or exactly right
After three months of ArgoCD managing our k3s and production clusters, the deployment confidence, audit trail, and rollback speed paid for the setup cost within the first incident.
- /argocd
- /kubernetes
- /ci-cd
- /k3s
- /blog
- December 23, 2024 4 min
Setting up k3s on a mini PC for staging and why every startup needs a junk drawer environment
A $300 mini PC running k3s gave our team a staging environment that mirrors production topology without the cloud bill. The real value was deployment confidence.
- /k3s
- /kubernetes
- /homelab
- /self-hosting
- /blog
- September 4, 2024 5 min
Observability on a shoestring: Grafana, Loki, and Tempo for free
We could not afford Datadog. I self-hosted the Grafana stack on our k3s homelab cluster and pointed production at it.
- /observability
- /kubernetes
- /homelab
- /docker
- /blog
- August 7, 2024 4 min
ArgoCD on a single-node k3s cluster: overkill or exactly right
Everyone told me ArgoCD on a single-node homelab was absurd. GitOps on a single node means I can rebuild from a Git repo in under 10 minutes.
- /argocd
- /k3s
- /homelab
- /kubernetes
- /blog