Infrastructure

Every platform team eventually asks the same question: should we build an Internal Developer Platform? The honest answer is usually yes. The part that wrecks teams is the how. I’ve watched platforms that cost a small fortune get shipped and then quietly abandoned because nobody wanted to use them. I’ve also seen a couple of Helm charts and a Kyverno policy change how a whole team ships software. The gap between those two outcomes has almost nothing to do with budget or which fashionable tool you picked. It comes down to whether you started by solving a real problem or by building the platform you imagined developers should want. ...

Three mini-PCs sit on a shelf in my house. Together they run my GitLab, my monitoring stack, home automation, file sync, password manager, and a pile of other things I refuse to hand to someone else’s computer. The whole setup cost less than a single month of the equivalent managed Kubernetes bill, and I understand every layer of it because I built it myself. You can have the same thing. No cloud account, no rack, no five-figure budget. You need three second-hand machines and an afternoon where nobody bothers you. This is the cluster I keep coming back to when I talk about sovereign infrastructure, and here is exactly how it goes together. ...

The first time you run a stateful workload on a self-hosted cluster, you hit a wall. No cloud provider storage class to lean on. Just your nodes, their disks, and a Postgres pod that refuses to schedule because nothing can give it a PersistentVolume. So you start reading, and within an hour you’ve narrowed it down to two names that keep coming up: Longhorn and Rook-Ceph. I’ve run both in production. So let me get my bias out of the way before anything else: I default to Longhorn on small clusters, and I’ll explain exactly why later. Keep that in mind as you read, because it colours how I weigh things. Both are CNCF projects, both give you replicated block storage that survives a node dying, and both are good software. They just disagree about how much complexity you should be signing up for. ...

I’ve written about Talos Linux as the immutable Kubernetes OS, and I’ve compared Arch vs NixOS for workstations. One question keeps landing in my inbox after both: what about NixOS for the Kubernetes nodes themselves? It’s a fair question, because on paper these two look like siblings. NixOS and Talos are both declarative. Both can be immutable. Both put your configuration under version control. So why pick one over the other to run a cluster? ...