Gitops on Rusty Bower

Mac Studio as a Kubernetes Compute Satellite

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My K3s cluster runs on six Intel NUCs. They’re great for the 50+ containers that make up my homelab — Plex, Home Assistant, Frigate, Paperless, the usual suspects. But they’re terrible at machine learning. Four Skylake cores and 32 GB of RAM per node doesn’t get you far when Immich wants to classify 80,000 photos or Frigate wants a vision model to describe who’s at your door.

From Keel to Renovate: Better Container Image Updates for GitOps

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For years I used Keel to automatically update container images in my Kubernetes clusters. It worked, but as I moved to GitOps with ArgoCD, Keel’s push-based approach became a liability. I migrated to Renovate for PR-based image updates, and it’s been a significant improvement.

GitOps for Homelabs: Kustomize + ArgoCD Patterns and Pitfalls

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I manage two Kubernetes environments - a home cluster (bowerhaus) and a cloud cluster (rustycloud) - using GitOps with Kustomize and ArgoCD. After running this setup for a while, I’ve learned what works, what doesn’t, and some non-obvious gotchas.

Self-Hosted CI/CD with Drone, Gitea, and Harbor

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I run a fully self-hosted CI/CD pipeline using Drone for builds, Gitea for git hosting, and Harbor for container registry. No GitHub Actions, no Docker Hub, no external dependencies. Here’s how it all fits together.