Gitops

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. The Mac Studio sitting under my desk — M1 Ultra, 64 GB unified memory — is the opposite problem. Absurd single-machine ML performance, but I don’t want to migrate my entire cluster to it. I want the K8s cluster to stay the control plane for routing, TLS, service discovery, and GitOps, while the Mac handles the heavy compute. ...

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. The Problem with Keel Keel watches for new container images and updates deployments directly in the cluster. You can configure it via annotations: metadata: annotations: keel.sh/policy: major keel.sh/trigger: poll When a new image appears, Keel modifies the deployment in-place. ...

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. The Architecture kustomize/ ├── base/ # Shared, environment-agnostic configs │ ├── media/ │ │ ├── lidarr/ │ │ ├── radarr/ │ │ └── sonarr/ │ ├── home-automation/ │ │ ├── home-assistant/ │ │ └── frigate/ │ └── data-analytics/ │ ├── prometheus/ │ └── grafana/ ├── environments/ │ ├── bowerhaus/ │ │ ├── applicationsets/ # ArgoCD ApplicationSet │ │ └── apps/ # Per-app overlays │ │ ├── frigate/ │ │ ├── home-assistant/ │ │ └── prometheus/ │ └── rustycloud/ │ ├── applicationsets/ │ └── apps/ │ ├── plex/ │ ├── sonarr/ │ └── grafana/ The key principle: base contains environment-agnostic resources, environments contain overlays that customize for each cluster. ...