GitOps

My homelab started with one ArgoCD Application. Then a handful. The day I caught myself running kubectl apply -f for the fifteenth time to register yet another Application, I knew I’d built the exact thing I was trying to avoid: manual steps I had to remember, in an order I had to remember, with no record of what should exist. The App-of-Apps pattern fixes that with one idea. You create a single root Application by hand, and it creates everything else. After a cluster wipe I can rebuild the whole thing with one kubectl apply. That property is the entire reason I run it, and it’s the same reason I self-host in the first place: I want the repository to be the truth, not my memory. ...

For a couple of years my homelab cluster ran without much drama. Nodes came and went, workloads shifted around, and the worst I ever had to deal with was the occasional pod stuck in CrashLoopBackOff. The kind of stable where you stop thinking about what happens if it all goes away. Then one evening I ran a terraform destroy against the wrong workspace. By the time I noticed, the control plane was gone. Not degraded. Gone. ...

“Should I use ArgoCD or Flux?” I get this question over coffee, in Slack, in PR comments, probably once a week. People want me to declare a winner so they can stop thinking about it and go build something. Here is my bias, up front, so you can weigh everything that follows: I run ArgoCD on my own clusters. I have a few years of it under my belt and I like it. That preference is going to leak through no matter how careful I am, so I am telling you now instead of pretending I am neutral. ...

Here is the thing I never want to do again: ask a cluster what it is running and not trust the answer. For years that was normal. Someone ran kubectl apply, maybe from a laptop, maybe from a CI job nobody could find anymore, and the live state slowly drifted away from anything written down. When I switched to GitOps, that whole category of uncertainty disappeared. I push to Git, and the cluster converges to match. If I want to know what is deployed, I read a file. ...