Blog

How k3s was installed on a 5-node bare-metal cluster — one curl command per machine — and why k3s beat kubeadm, microk8s, RKE2, and k0s for this specific hardware.

How we think about model size, quantization formats, and inference tuning for a 5-node CPU-only k3s cluster — and why we replaced phi4-mini with Qwen 2.5 7B Q4_K_M.

Kubernetes does not automatically restart pods when a mounted ConfigMap changes — especially when using subPath mounts. We added Stakater Reloader to eliminate manual kubectl rollout restart calls across Homer, LiteLLM, SearXNG, and Backstage. Here's the problem, the fix, and a bonus ArgoCD OOMKill investigation we uncovered along the way.

How I built a production-grade Kubernetes platform on five bare-metal ThinkPad laptops — with MAAS provisioning, GitOps, SSO, observability, and AI services — and what I learned about real platform engineering along the way.