Kubernetes

I’ve written about Talos Linux as the immutable Kubernetes OS, and I’ve compared Arch vs NixOS for workstations. But there’s a question I get asked often: what about NixOS for Kubernetes nodes? Both NixOS and Talos are declarative. Both can be immutable. Both version their configuration. So why would you choose one over the other for running Kubernetes? I’ve run both in production. Here’s what I’ve learned. The Philosophical Difference Before diving into specifics, understand the core difference: ...

The first time I tried to SSH into a Talos node, I got nothing. No shell, no connection, no familiar Linux prompt. My immediate reaction was confusion, then mild panic. How am I supposed to debug this thing? That was three years ago. Today, I can’t imagine running Kubernetes on anything else. What is Talos Linux? Talos Linux is a Linux distribution designed specifically for Kubernetes. But calling it a “Linux distribution” undersells how different it is. Talos strips away everything that makes a traditional Linux system… traditional. ...

“We want to migrate to Kubernetes by November.” It was September. The client was an e-commerce company. Their biggest sales event of the year — Black Friday — was in late November. I said no. They asked if I knew someone who might take it on anyway. I did. A fellow platform engineer — someone I respect, highly capable. I made the introduction, but warned him about the timeline. He took the engagement, documented the same concerns I had, got them signed off. The client proceeded anyway. ...

“Autonomous cluster management” — the promise that an AI can monitor your Kubernetes cluster, diagnose problems, and perhaps even fix them without human intervention. It sounds like the holy grail for platform engineers. The reality is more nuanced. In this post I test K8sGPT with a locally running Llama 3.3 70B model on Apple Silicon. No cloud APIs, no data leaving your network, fully sovereign. Is this usable for real cluster diagnosis? Let’s find out. ...

What if you could have complete control over your email, your photos, your documents, your everything — without needing to understand Linux, Kubernetes, or networking? What if self-hosting was as easy as paying a monthly subscription, but instead of feeding your data to Big Tech, you actually owned it? This is the future I’m building towards. The Problem: We’ve Lost Control Every day, billions of people hand over their most intimate data to companies whose business model depends on exploiting it. Your emails, your photos, your location history, your browsing habits — all stored on servers you don’t control, governed by terms of service you didn’t read, in jurisdictions that may not protect your rights. ...