Posts tagged: kubernetes

💭 kubernetes is beautiful r/kubernetes

2026-03-23T21:29:40Z

This is a fantastic progression through kuberentes concepts. From running a pod, to making it resiliant, holding secrets, accepting traffic, and autoscaling.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

dot dockerenv

2026-03-18T10:07:16Z

Today I learned that docker creates an empty /.dockerenv file to indicate that you are running in a docker container. Other runtimes like podman commonly use /run/.containerenv. kubernetes uses neither of these, the most common way to detect if you are running in kubernetes is to check for the presence of the KUBERNETES_SERVICE_HOST environment variable. There will also be a directory at /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount that contains the service account credentials if you are running in kubernetes.

diff kubernetes manifest with cluster

2026-02-05T09:37:39Z

Like a dufus this morning I did a hard reset on a git repo for getting I was working on a manifest for. You see I generally use argo, but occasionally I have no idea what I am doing or want yet and I start raw doggin it, fully aware that I’m going to just nuke this namespace before getting it into a proper argocd.

I was overjoyed when I found out that you can diff your manifests with live production using the kubectl diff command. It uses standard diff so you can bring all your fancy diff viewers you like.

# regular manifest
kubectl diff -f k8s/shots -n shot
# kustomize
kubectl diff -k k8s -n go-waylonwalker-com
# using a fancy diff viewer
kubectl diff -f k8s/shots -n shot | delta
# using an even fancier diff viewer
# pinkies out for this one
kubectl diff -f k8s/shots -n shot | delta --diff-so-fancy

Now I can get those changes back that I thought I lost, and apply updates with confidence knowing what is about to change.

💭 AI, DevOps, and Kubernetes: Kelsey Hightower on What’s Next - ...

2025-12-13T04:07:15Z

Kelsey has a really good lightbulb moment here about platform engineering.

“if you had to do all the deployments for the entire company what questions would you ask of the development team?”

That’s your api, your platform, this is your product as a platform engineer. It’s not images, docker, terraform, hcl, yaml, kubernetes, It’s building out the right api for your company to deploy its products effectively.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdUbTyvrfKo&t=429s

timestamped

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

The Right Reasons To Run Kubernetes In Your Homelab

2025-12-10T09:48:14Z

Running kubernetes in your homelab is a fantastic way to learn, explore, express yourself, and run services that you use.

The Right Reasons To Run Kubernetes In Your Homelab #

There are not many

You want to learn kubernetes
You like kubernetes
You want to learn to scale

There are also The Wrong Reasons To Run Kubernetes In Your Homelab

You want to learn kubernetes #

Homelabbing is a such a great way to learn new skills, deploy real apps that you use. Create new custom apps for your specific use cases that no one else has. You should absolutely run kubernetes in your homelab if you want to learn it.

I would recommend to start locally, pull up kind, minikube, or k3d and start from your local machine before putting it on a server.

When you decide you are ready for a server, you probably don’t need any crazy hardware. You can probably run on some old retired Dell Optiplex or an old desktop someone is throwing out as it no longer runs windows.

You like kubernetes #

Hell Yeah Brother, 100% no better reason to run kubernetes at home than because you enjoy it. I’m with you. There’s nothing quite like having git ops kick in and deploy new services, updates, watching deployments rollover with zero downtime. Watching your cluster heal itself when a node goes down. Never ssh-ing in to do deployments. Still owning your entire hardware.

You want to learn to scale #

This is probably a stretch reason, maybe not a good one, there are probably better ways, but here we go.

Don’t claim that you need scale in your homelab, you don’t. But it sure is fun to run a cluster of nodes, and load balancing services that run across them. Solving these hard problems to scale across machines is hard. There’s no way around it, there’s a lot to think about. Doing so in a low stakes environment that you have skin in the game is a great way to learn.

I run kubernetes in my homelab #

I run it and I really like it

What flavor of autism did you guys get, I got the kind where I run kubernetes in my basement.

Here are some things I really like about it, and Yes I know you can achieve most of these without kubernetes.

I don’t have to ssh, hardly ever.
I can see everything I’m running, and its defined in a manifest
k9s is amazing, and I use it all the time.
- shell into running pods
- restart deployments
- scale deployments
- trigger cronjobs
- watch logs
- I can scale our minecraft server to 0 in seconds if we are in a different season of life
ArgoCD is amazing
- I ❤️ gitops
Ingress just works
Longhorn
- makes snapshots and backups easy
- makes multi node easy
zero-downtime deployments
self healing health checks

I mostly do very simple things, deployments with a container, a volume and ingress. Probably things that you could easily run on fly.io. Theres nothing really fancy. I just like how easy this setup works for me.

minecraft server memory

2025-12-10T08:46:36Z

I learned to today that setting MEMORY on your minecraft server causes the JVM to egregiously allocate all of that memory. Not setting it causes slow downs and potential crashes, but setting INIT_MEMORY and MAX_MEMORY gives us the best of both worlds. It is allowed to use more, but does not gobble it all up on startup.

In this economy we need to save all the memory we can!

Here is a non-working snippet for a minecraft server deployment in kubernetes.

      containers:
        - name: dungeon
          image: itzg/minecraft-server
          env:
            - name: EULA
              value: "true"
            - name: INIT_MEMORY
              value: "512M"
            - name: MAX_MEMORY
              value: "3G"

and in docker compose

  dungeon:
    image: itzg/minecraft-server
    environment:
      EULA: "true"
      INIT_MEMORY: "512M"
      MAX_MEMORY: "3G"

The Wrong Reasons To Run Kubernetes In Your Homelab

2025-12-06T09:46:47Z

Running kubernetes in your homelab is complex, time consuming, there are almost no docs to help you (homelab focused docs for things you want to install), and nothing is copy paste. You have to make everything happen yourself.

The Wrong Reasons To Run Kubernetes In Your Homelab #

I run compose and think kubernetes is the next logical step
Techno Tim runs it
I heard it’s what cool kids do
Kubernetes BTW
Talos Linux looks cool
I found a cool helm chart on GitHub
I need scale

There are also The Right Reasons To Run Kubernetes In Your Homelab.

I run compose and think kubernetes is the next logical step #

No it’s not. It’s much different than running docker, compose, swarm. It’s meant for scale, it’s complex, it’s made for enterprise, not your local development or your homelab. It can do these things, it can do them quite well, but it’s not the target audience.

Techno Tim runs it #

I heard it’s what cool kids do

You need to rethink who the cool kids are, touch some grass. Tim also does it for his job, he likes it, he knows it, he wants to lean on it and learn more.

Kubernetes BTW #

Kubernetes does not make you look cool, it makes you look like you are trying to over optimize and over engineer your life. It’s not worth it, in fact nothing in life is worth worrying about what everyone else thinks of you.

Talos Linux looks cool #

Talos is an S tier OS wherever you deploy it. It is a secure, minimal, kubernetes first OS. They also have some really great people working there putting Talos in some really cool places like backpack or Apple Power Mac

I found a cool helm chart on GitHub #

No you didn’t. Everything in homelab is compose first. A few things have a k8s option, but almost nothing is k8s first.

I need scale #

No. You’re homelab does not need scale. If you think it does, you have some real shit hardware, some bad optimizations, or somehow you have a startup you need to launch cause you got more users than most.

k3s system-upgrade minor by minor

2025-12-05T09:25:39Z

The k3s system-upgrade controller is a fantastic tool for upgrading k3s automatically. It has done a fantastic job for me every time I’ve used it. Today I ran it on a cluster that needed to upgrade several minors and I learned that the controller does not pick up on changes to the channel url if you change from minor to minor.

The solution I came up with was to name the plan with the version it supports. Then on each patch upgrade, change both the plan name and the channel. I use gitops with argocd, it automcatically cleaned up old plans, created new plans, and the system-upgrade-controller picked up the plan and started applying immediately.

# Server plan
apiVersion: upgrade.cattle.io/v1
kind: Plan
metadata:
  name: server-plan-v1.33 # <- This is important if you want to change the channel name
  namespace: system-upgrade
spec:
  concurrency: 1
  cordon: true
  nodeSelector:
    matchExpressions:
    - key: node-role.kubernetes.io/control-plane
      operator: In
      values:
      - "true"
  serviceAccountName: system-upgrade
  upgrade:
    image: rancher/k3s-upgrade
  channel: https://update.k3s.io/v1-release/channels/v1.33
---
# Agent plan
apiVersion: upgrade.cattle.io/v1
kind: Plan
metadata:
  name: agent-plan-v1.33 # <- This is important if you want to change the channel name
  namespace: system-upgrade
spec:
  concurrency: 1
  cordon: true
  nodeSelector:
    matchExpressions:
    - key: node-role.kubernetes.io/control-plane
      operator: DoesNotExist
  prepare:
    args:
    - prepare
    - server-plan
    image: rancher/k3s-upgrade
  serviceAccountName: system-upgrade
  upgrade:
    image: rancher/k3s-upgrade
  channel: https://update.k3s.io/v1-release/channels/v1.33

I’d love to see a better way if you have a way to upgrade through minors, or manually control the minor of your cluster let me know.

💭 PETaflop cluster - Justin Garrison

2025-11-12T17:44:41Z

PETaflop cluster

AI is a pain in the back.

Justin Garrison · justingarrison.com

Justin makes the coolest kubernetes clusters wishing I could see it in the flesh at Kubecon.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

Should I kubernetes My Homelab

2025-08-11T09:28:16Z

Yes

Ok we should probably dive deeper into this, but good chance if you are here and have made it this far you it would probably be a fine choice. The choice is quite time and skill dependant.

Time #

First thing up, if you like copy pasting thing into your homelab, changing a few config options, but mostly running it as the docs instructed, kubernetes is not for you. The homelab/self hosting space is heavily reliant on docker compose, 90% of the things you want to run will likely have a docker command, and likely a docker compose example that you can copy paste and get running right away. Maybe 5% of projects have something for kubernetes, you Will have to do it yourself.

Kubernetes is very DIY in the self hosting space, and not very plug and play.

Skill #

💭 Meet Gor | Just Fucking use kubernetes

2025-08-02T14:53:45Z

External Link

meetgor.com

Sometimes, all you need is a mindset shift, a blocker in your mind that holds you back from doing certain things. And for me, I have consumed enough tutorials and posts about Kubernetes, that I need to put to use and create. I have been stuck in the learning cycle, lets push to prod with kubernetes.

This hurts. I know others with this learning style that need to see the full picture before actually doing something with new tech. The way I first got into kubernetes I was looking for the easy route and somehow k8s came up several times as a suggested route Looking for a Heroku replacement, What I found was shocking!, So I dove in head first with k3s and kompose. What I found was that it was not all that hard once you start to see how the pieces fit together, no amount of reading tutorials would have gotten me there.

Does anyone care if you use simple yet fragile bash scripts or heavy weight Kubernetes cluster for just clicking buttons and creating and updating rows in a database? No!

You know what, let’s fucking use Kubernetes.

Let’s Gooo. Use what is right for you and stop parroting kubernets is hard, heavy, for big companies, maybe actually try it first.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Kubernetes Isn't for You

2025-08-02T14:40:42Z

Kubernetes Isn

Kubernetes isn

sliplane.io

This post feels like it was written by someone who has never tried kubernetes, someone who reads twitter, listens to t3.gg and thePrimeagen (who cant even container let alone kubernetes). If you cant run linux, use bash, build your own docker images, run docker comfortably. If infra is not your thing kubernetes is probably not for you.

Kubernetes Was Built for Google

Just like how react was built for facebook to solve facebook problems with many teams contributing effectively to the same interactive interfaces. Turns out that react is actually a pretty good product if you have a highly interactive page, and if this is your bread and butter, you can make overly heavy static sites with too much build very effectively. It works and runs much of the internet now.

We are getting serious. We need serious tools. Big companies use Kubernetes. We should too. It feels more professional. It sounds like we know what we are doing.

If anyone uses these reasons to pitch kubernetes to me they don’t belong in a position to make any sort of decision. The first one could be a heading with maybe something under it.

But Kubernetes should not be your first infrastructure step. It should be a response to real pain, not an emotional milestone

As with anything, it depends! Keeping with the react example, if you have a team with these skills its a solid choice, maybe its overkill, but you got this skills to start here then go for it.

If you have never given something a real shot then don’t be writing articles shitting on the tech. Actually if you do not have a deep expertise in it you probably should not be writing articles shitting on other tech. If you are the CEO of an alternative, you definitely should not be writing articles shitting on your competition. just build the biggest fucking building in town .

If you are kube curios give kind and kompose a try, you will be surprised at how quickly you can get something up and running in kubernetes. You might be surprised at how easy it is to remotely manage, add gitops workflows with argocd. Give k9s a try and you can see all of your nodes, services, ingress, pvcs, EVERYTHING you have deployed and its status in one easy to use TUI.

I avoided kubernetes for a long time because articles like this told me to and I never gave it a fair try.

Check out just fucking use kubernetes for a satirical opposite take.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

just fucking use kubernetes

2025-07-01T12:46:33Z

You want to run containers?

JUST FUCKING USE KUBERNETES.

Obvious satire

If you don't like harsh language this is not the post for you.  Obviously

ripping off motherfuckingwebsite.

ThIs is AI SLoP

If you don't like if you can fuck off to the next post, I'm having fun here,

but satire is not my strong suit and needed some help.

“But it’s complicated!” #

Shut up. Close twitter and fucking do something. Life is complicated. You know what else is complicated? Email. DNS. Life. Kubernetes is the least painful way to orchestrate containers at scale. Docker Compose is for your laptop.

Swarm is dead.
Nomad is just sad.
Systemd units? Get out of here.

“But my app is small!” #

SO IS YOUR AMBITION. You could write a bunch of bash scripts and hope they work on prod. You could SSH into servers and handcraft your infra like it’s 2011. Or you could just fucking use Kubernetes and sleep at night.

I can just throw my script in crontab #

Tell that to your boss when your cronjob failed 16 times in the last week without anyone noticing. kubernete makes it fucking simple, want retry ask for it. Hanging script, activeDeadlineSeconds that bitch. Connecting to six other services in your shitty ass infrastructure this shit retries automatically.

“I don’t need autoscaling!” #

Cool. Tell that to your boss when the CEO tweets your link and the site goes down harder than your last date.

“But YAML is ugly!” #

So is your Terraform, your Ansible, your Prometheus config, your custom CI/CD scripts written in Bash, and the spaghetti you called a monolith before you went microservices and made it worse.

“Kubernetes is too heavy!” #

Compared to what?

Your handcrafted, artisanal, single-node LXC setup running on an Intel NUC from 2014?

Heard of k3s? k0s? No. These fuckers will have you running kubernetes running on your grandpas goddamn gateway 2000 right next to AOL messenger without splooging out the the ashes of his Marlboro Reds.

SSH? #

You don’t need no goddam ssh to install your 200lb gorilla editor so you can hand edit your init files and carefully contruct your init system. This is kubernetes, you use the fucking api, all you need is a connection and a kubeconfig. This motherfucker runs containers so you can keep your bitch-ass editor where it belongs, off the fucking host machine!

“What if it’s overkill?” #

What if YOU are underkill?

“How do I do zero-downtime deploys?” #

Probes my dude, you fucking probe your shit. Rolling out a new deployment kubernets won’t cut over to your broke ass release if that shit don’t pass. No more writing janky scripts that SSH into prod and run git pull while praying to the CI/CD gods.

“What if I still fuck it up - How do I roll back?” #

k9s is your best friend, pop that shit open find your broke ass deployment, jump owner to the replicaset and roll that bitch back to the working shit.

I need to scale #

This shit is built in, add a goddamn replica or 6 for fuck sake, need autoscaling use the HPA. This aint your granpas hand fucking crafted pet server, its fucking cattle. Load balancing just fucking happens, don’t think about it just use it, and it will work for your six goddamn friends that actually use your shit.

I want gitops #

Let me introduce you to argocd, this fucker uses helm so one fucking command and your ass is on the beach while your dev team deploys their own shit.

USE KUBERNETES #

It fucking works.
Everyone else is using it.
There are like 500 open-source projects built just to make it easier.
It runs on your laptop, your server, the cloud, and inside your dreams.
It will make your resume better.

Not convinced? #

Here’s your alternative stack:

A bash script that restarts Docker when it dies.
A Makefile that deploys via SCP.
A cron job that prays to the log gods.
A wiki page explaining how to debug your hand-rolled bullshit.
You. Crying.

So yeah #

Save yourself. Save your team. Save your infrastructure.

JUST #

FUCKING #

USE #

KUBERNETES #

(or don’t, and become a DevOps cautionary tale)

Seealso

kubernetes node labels

2025-05-28T18:49:19Z

If you need to target a specific k8s node in the cluster, you can use labels. You want to treat your nodes as much like cattle as you can, but sometimes budgets get in the way. You might be like me and just run any free hardware you can get in your cluster, or you might have some large storage or gpu needs that you can’t afford to put on every node in the cluster.

kubectl get nodes --show-labels

# add the bigpool label
kubectl label node k8s-1 bigpool=true
kubectl get nodes --show-labels

# remove the bigpool label
kubectl label node k8s-1 bigpool-

To use the label in a pod set spec.nodeSelector to the label that you applied.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: busybox
spec:
  containers:
  - name: busybox
    image: busybox
  nodeSelector:
    bigpool: "true"

💭 k8s-monitoring-helm/charts/k8s-monitoring/docs/examples/privat...

2025-05-23T19:58:59Z

k8s-monitoring-helm/charts/k8s-monitoring/docs/examples/private-image-registries/globally/values.yaml at main · grafana/k8s-monitoring-helm

Contribute to grafana/k8s-monitoring-helm development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub · github.com

k8s-monitoring requires setting imageregistry and pullsecrets twice

global:
  image:
    registry: my.registry.com
    pullSecrets:
      - name: my-registry-creds
  imageRegistry: my.registry.com
  imagePullSecrets:
    - name: my-registry-creds

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Why is Kubernetes everywhere? | Kelsey Hightower - YouTube

2025-01-29T16:28:21Z

Kelsey says several times in this interview, you don’t need kubernetes. If you are running one node you don’t need kubernetes. My question though is, would you use kubernetes? Ya I get it if you are a web developer, data scientist, backend dev, but if you are looking to bee a whole ass engineer, or infrastructure engineer, you know kubernetes, Should you use kubernetes on single node?

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 GitHub - ngalaiko/tree-sitter-go-template: Golang template gra...

2025-01-06T18:49:13Z

GitHub - ngalaiko/tree-sitter-go-template: Golang template grammar for tree-sitter

Golang template grammar for tree-sitter. Contribute to ngalaiko/tree-sitter-go-template development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub · github.com

This setup fixed my nvim syntax highlighting in helm templates.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

k3s config after first install

2024-09-15T16:57:41Z

After first setting up a new k3s instance your kubeconfig file will be located in /etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml.

You cans use it from here by setting $KUBECONFIG to that file.

export KUBECONFIG=/etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml

Or you can copy it to ~/.kube/config

cp /etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml ~/.kube/config

If you have installed k3s on a remote server and need the config on your local machine then you will need to modify the server address to reflect the remote server.

scp user@<server-ip>:/etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml ~/.kube/config

Warning

only do this if you don’t already have a ~/.kube/config file, otherwise copy it to a new file and set your $KUBECONFIG env variable to use it.

Now you will need to open that file and change the server address, making sure to keep the port number.

apiVersion: v1
clusters:
  - cluster:
      certificate-authority-data: ****
      server: https://<server-ip>:6443
    name: default

k8s kustomize diff

2024-07-06T09:42:42Z

I’ve started leaning in on kubernetes kustomize to customize my manifests per deployment per environment. Today I learned that it comes with a diff command.

kubectl diff -k k8s/overlays/local

You can enable color diffs by using an external diff provider like colordiff.

export KUBECTL_EXTERNAL_DIFF="colordiff -N -u"

You might need to install colordiff if you don’t already have it.

sudo pacman -S colordiff

sudo apt install colordiff

Now I can try out kustomize changes and see the change with kustomize diff.

kubectl dash k

2024-07-05T20:15:11Z

Kubernetes ships with a feature called kustomize that allows you to customize your manifests in a declarative way. It’s a bit like helm, but easier to use. I found this useful.

kustomization.yaml #

In order to use kustomize you need to have a kustomization.yaml, kustomization.yml, or Kustomization file in the directory you are applying.

kubectl apply -k .
error: unable to find one of 'kustomization.yaml', 'kustomization.yml' or 'Kustomization' in directory '/tank/git/kustomize-playground'

The kustomization.yaml file cannot be empty.

❯ kubectl apply -k pod
error: kustomization.yaml is empty

lets make an mvp #

mkdir pod
touch pod/pod.yaml
touch pod/kustomization.yaml

# pod.yaml

# kustomization.yaml

Overlays #

Overlays must point to yaml or a directory with a kustomization.yaml file, and cannot reside inside the same directory causing a circular reference.

Layout #

k8s
├── base
│   ├── deployment.yaml
│   └── kustomization.yaml
├── overlays
│   ├── local
│   │   └── kustomization.yaml
│   ├── dev
│   │   └── kustomization.yaml
│   └── prod
│       ├── special-prod.yaml
│       └── kustomization.yaml

base #

Place all of the common k8s manifests here in the base directory along with kustomization.yaml. You can split them up into separate files or just one file, I’m keeping it to one for simiplicity.

base - kustomization.yaml #

In the base kustomization.yaml file add all of the manifests that you want to use as a resource.

resources:
  - deployment.yaml

overlays #

Now for each separate environment that you want to have create a directory in overlays with a kustomization.yaml file, and any special manifests that only apply to a particular environment.

overlays - kustomization.yaml #

resoures #

resources:
  - ../../base
# any other specific resources, maybe special ones for prod here
  - sealed-dotenv.yaml

images #

images:
  - name: my-image
    newName: docker.io/myrepo/myimage
    newTag: 1.0.0