Interesting, I might check them out.
I liked garden because it was “for kubernetes”. It was a horse and it had its course.
I had the wrong assumption that all those CD tools were specifically tailored to run as workers in a deployment pipeline.

I’m willing to re-evaluate my deployment stack, tbh.
I’ll definitely dig more into flux and ansible.
Thanks!

Oh, operators are absolutely the way for “released” things.

But on bigger projects with lots of different pods etc, it’s a lot of work to make all the CRD definitions, hook all the events, and write all the code to deploy the pods etc.
Similar to helm charts, I don’t see the point for personal projects. I’m not sharing it with anyone, I don’t need helm/operator abstraction for it.
And something like cdk8s will generate the yaml for you to inspect. So you can easily validate that you are “doing the right thing” before slinging it into k8s.

Everyone talks about helm charts.
I tried them and hate writing them.
I found garden.io, and it makes a really nice way to consume repos (of helm charts, manifests etc) and apply them in a sensible way to a k8s cluster.
Only thing is, it seems to be very tailored to a team of developers. I kinda muddled through with it, and it made everything so much easier.
Although I massively appreciate that helm charts are used for most projects, they make sense for something you are going to share.
But if it’s a solo project or consuming other people’s projects, I don’t think it really solves a problem.

Which is why I used garden.io. Designed for deploying kubernetes manifests, I found it had just enough tooling to make things easier.
Though, if you are used to ansible, it might make more sense to use ansible.
Pretty sure ansible will be able to do it all in a way you are familiar with.

As for writing the manifests themselves, I find it rare I need to (unless it’s something I’ve made myself). Most software has a k8s helm chart. So I just reference that in a garden file, set any variables I need to, and all good.
If there aren’t helm charts or kustomize files, then it’s adapting a docker compose file into manifests. Which is manual.
Occasionally I have to write some CRDs, config maps or secrets (CMs and secrets are easily made in garden).

I also prefer to install operators, instead of the raw service. For example, I use Cloudnative Postgres to set up postgres databases.
I create a CRD that defines the database, and CNPG automatically provisions all the storage, pods, services, config maps and secrets.

The way I use kubernetes for the projects I do is:
Apply all the infrastructure stuff (gateways, metallb, storage provisioners etc) from helm files (or similar).
Then apply all my pods, services, certificates etc from hand written manifests.
Using garden, I can make sure things are deployed in the correct order: operators are installed before trying to apply a CRD, secrets/cms created before being referenced etc.
If I ever have to wipe and reinstall a cluster, it takes me 30 minutes or so from a clean TalosOS install to the project up and running, with just 3 or 4 commands.

Any on-the-fly changes I make, I ensure I back port to the project configs so when I wipe, reset, reinstall I still get what I expect.

However, I have recently found https://cdk8s.io/ and I’m meaning to investigate that for creating the manifests themselves.
Write code using a typed language, and have cdk8s create the raw yaml manifests. Seems like a dream!
I hate writing yaml. Auto complete is useless (the editor has no idea what format the yaml doc should take), auto formatting is useless (mostly because yaml is whitespace sensitive, and the editor has no idea what things are a child or a new parent). It just feels ugly and clunky.

So uplink is 500/500.
LAN speed tests at 1000/1000.
WAN is 100/400.
VPN is 8/8.

I’m guessing the VPN is part of your homelab? Or do you mean a generic commercial VPN (like pia or proton)?

How does the domain resolve on the LAN? Is it split horizon (so local ip on the lan, public IP on public DNS)?
Is the homelab on a separate subnet/vlan from the computer you ran the speed test from? Or the same subnet?

No.
I tried a smart watch for a week or so, and hated wearing it.
Hadn’t worn a watch in 20 years, and it felt very strange

I’m always nervous about fintech companies. Maybe it’s time to get over that and give curve pay a spin.
The cashback seems nice, considering a lot of shops I use are on there.

Not if you use wildcard dns records.

Yup, true.

But contactless via a phone can have no limit.
Adding a debit card to phone case means the upper limit is £100. Which is actually fine, and is the limit I have normally set for phone contactless. But I can instantly remove that limit via my banking app.

And the phone needs to be unlocked to make a payment.
Do if I lose my phone anyone can charge £100 to the debit card.

Servers: one. No need to make the log a distributed system, CT itself is a distributed system.

The uptime target is 99%3 over three months, which allows for nearly 22h of downtime. That’s more than three motherboard failures per month.

CPU and memory: whatever, as long as it’s ECC memory. Four cores and 2 GB will do.

Bandwidth: 2 – 3 Gbps outbound.
Storage:
3 – 5 TB of usable redundant filesystem space on SSD or.
3 – 5 TB of S3-compatible object storage, and 200 GB of cache on SSD.
People: at least two. The Google policy requires two contacts, and generally who wants to carry a pager alone.

Seems beyond you typical homelab self hoster, except for the countries that have 5gbps symmetric home broadband.
If anyone can sneak 2-3gbps outbound pass their employer, I imagine the rest is trivial.
Altho… “At least 2 [people]” isn’t the typical self hosting

Edit:
Tried to fix the copy/paste.

Also will add:

https://crt.sh/
Has a list of all certificates issued.
If you are using LE for every subdomain of your homelab (including internal), maybe think about a wildcard cert?
One of those “obscurity isn’t security”, but why advertise your endpoints? Also increases privacy (IE not advertising porn(dot)example(dot)com)

This… Except for contactless payment.
I used graphene for a month. It was lovely. Even things like banking apps worked.
I don’t care about absolute privacy, but I do care about controlling my privacy. Grapheme gave me that.

I had only 1 issue.
Contactless payment.
It’s extremely convenient to me, from public transport to groceries. I just bop my phone.

The fact that Google has that locked down surely violates some EU laws. But I’m sure they wave away the laws because of “financial security” or some other bullshit.
As if bank card NFC/contactless doesn’t suffer exactly the same issues.
I looked into some “graphene contactless payment” type systems or workarounds, and I couldn’t find anything that would fill the gap.

Why do you dislike PHP?

G0 summits would represent a significant savings

Windows 11 and OSX are so outdated

Interesting. I might try them, or see if I can get them.
But I haven’t smoked in a decade, and I have no urge to smoke again.
I’m addicted to the nicotine now, instead of the habit of smoking. Which works for me.

Oh yeh. I wish smoking was just completely not a thing and never was a thing.

When I started it was very socially acceptable and cheap to smoke.
Then it got less socially acceptable (indoor smoking ban), and a big bump in price. I tried quiting a few times, but I always ended up smoking again.
Somehow, when working hard and under time constraints “going for a smoke break” was an accepted excuse to spend 5 minutes outside. Bonkers.

Anyway, a proper vaping setup, making my own vape juice and all that had me forget about cigarettes within a few weeks, and I vaped for 5 years. Maybe 8?
Still had an excuse to go for a break, but I felt so much healthier vaping than I ever did smoking. And I could still sneak a vape indoors if there wasn’t time for me to go outside.

Been on the pouches for 1.5 years now.

So yeh, increase the taxes on tobacco. A small bump for vaping nicotine (imo, safer than smoking but not risk free). And ideally no tax increase for nicotine products.

I could see a minor bump in taxes for snus/snuff/chewing tobacco. It’s still a risk to the consumer (because it’s tobacco), but it doesn’t pose a risk to 3rd parties (because it’s not burnt or aerosolised).

I hope it’s sensible with regards to tobacco derived products (ie nicotine).
I used vaping to quit smoking. And I’m now on the nicotine pouches and have quit vaping.
I know I’m just swapping 1 addiction for another, but each has significantly reduced the risk to me and those around me.

But if the pouches do get more expensive, I’m sure there’s some nicorette or some other official/medical nicotine thing I can swap to. I assume they won’t get a tax increase (cause if they do, then the tax is stupid)

Unless your home internet is CG-NAT, both have a publicly accessible IP address, so both will be scanned

A founding member of NATO…

Who is externally reaching these servers?
Joe public? Or just you and people you trust?

If it’s Joe public, I wouldn’t have the entry point on my home network (I might VPS tunnel, or just VPS host it).

If it’s just me and people I trust, I would use VPN for access, as opposed to exposing all these services publicly

Nothing better than a properly formatted data file.
Self hosting teaches you this