devops

No kubectl apply allowed. One app, three stages, and four things that broke on the way to a public audiobook server running on my homelab.

The exercise said not to write the Ingress myself. Make the Helm chart do it. I spent the first half convinced I was just typing commands for no reason, and the second half fighting the space bar.

My bookmark manager only existed behind a port-forward. Getting it onto the public internet took a Cloudflare Tunnel, a Service I never made, and a certificate lesson I did not see coming.

The first course worked. The second one showed me which parts of my design were real and which parts were just how FSI happened to be laid out.

A free FSI course, an OCR text layer that is mostly right, and a five stage pipeline you can run twice without breaking anything.

One command, two numbers, and every one of them wrong at some point while I tested Navidrome and Open WebUI.

Two settings that had been quietly ignored for 37 days, a root-owned volume on the Dell, and the restart test that almost scared me.

A macOS update took Rosetta with it, and every Intel tool on my Mac quit at the same time. How to spot it, the one-line fix, and why that fix is on a timer.

For weeks every command I ran went through the control plane over SSH. The first time a checklist asked my own laptop to do the work, five problems showed up in a row.

I added persistent storage to Linkding, pushed it, and got nothing back. The manifest was correct. Something else was quietly blocking the entire thing.

I got tired of port-forwarding to Grafana, so I wrote a Service. It looked perfect and went absolutely nowhere, and then fixing it changed nothing at all.

I couldn't log into my own Grafana. Three guesses, all wrong, and the reason why turned out to be more interesting than the fix.

Adding a second machine to a one-node cluster. The join itself is one command. Fedora needs four things done first, and skipping any of them fails in a way that does not look like the cause.

Bootstrapping Flux on a fresh k3s cluster so Git becomes the source of truth, plus the token scopes and pre-flight checks that tripped me up.

The hands-on version. Deploy the same database twice, delete a pod each time, and watch it vanish once and survive once, with the output you should see at every step.

What each one is, how you ask for it, when to reach for which, and why the difference decides whether your data is still there after a pod restarts.

I froze on a kubectl command Mischa asked about. It felt exactly like building a sentence in Portuguese. Both are grammar, and that changed how I learn.

How a request finds your app in Kubernetes. Ingress routes by host and path, a Service load-balances across pods with a stable address, and the pod answers. With a hands-on k3s demo you can run yourself.

One of the first things I picked up, and one of the few I still reach for every single day. From your first connection to logging in with a single word.

You're a junior sysadmin, your manager just dropped "migrate everything to containers by end of sprint" in Slack, and you Google'd what is a container. Welcome. Let's actually fix that.