Blog

How a self-hosted Harbor instance, configured as a pull-through proxy for docker.io, ghcr.io, quay.io, and registry.k8s.io, becomes the single entry point for all image traffic on a bare-metal k3s cluster — eliminating Docker Hub rate limits, centralizing vulnerability scanning, and keeping air-gap capability without any code changes in your manifests.

Service accounts, robot accounts, break-glass tokens, OAuth2 client credentials, API keys — a self-hosted Kubernetes platform uses all of them. Here is how they differ, why each one exists, and what happens when you lose track of one.

How we migrated the minicloud root CA private key from a plaintext Kubernetes secret into HashiCorp Vault's PKI engine — importing the same CA so no certificate had to be re-issued, no trust store had to be updated, and no service saw any disruption.

Most tutorials teach you to deploy on AWS. We went the other way: five bare-metal nodes on the floor, Cloudflare at the edge, and cloud services only where physics makes self-hosting impossible. This is why.

Most enterprises carry 25 years of identity debt — AD on-prem, LDAP connectors, Entra sync agents. We built a Kubernetes platform from scratch and landed directly at the modern end of that arc. This post explains the difference and why it matters.

How to build a production AI gateway that routes between local models and cloud APIs, enforces department-level access controls, strips PII before it leaves your network, and traces every call — all behind a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint.

We ran Ollama in production on bare-metal ThinkPads with no GPU. Then we replaced it with vLLM. This is the honest account of what broke, what improved, and what the right tool actually is for CPU-only inference in a real cluster.

The standard advice is Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, or Vertex AI. But what about organisations that cannot or will not send their data to American servers? Here is the full picture.

Ollama is a great developer tool. vLLM is what you run when real users are waiting. Here is exactly why the difference matters — and what changes when you move from one to the other.