With the inspiration from a work pal, I started my journey in Kubernetes, and before it become natural to me, I want to write down some transient thoughts of this adaption.

I intentionally complicated my life again, so the goal of my first K8s infra is:

• Fully offline, air-gapped environment¹.
• GitOps, because I am lazy and sometimes unreliable for trusting in myself.
• Hardened and simple as possible. KISS.
• No closed-source and proprietary blobs. (still investigating, low priority for now)
• Lightweight yet scalable.
• Completely reproducible, easy re-installation and treat software as disposable.
• Full disk encryption for data. (finally freeing me from writing the password of my LUKS via SSH!)

So I ended with Talos. And it feels perfect for this use case, I am passionated with it.

Until now, my progress with K8s and Talos is:

• Had settupped a bare Talos into a Raspberry PI 4, works very nice. But did it manually and with internet connection.
• Did my first K8s deploy on Vultr via their simple Terraform provider and managed K8s plane ↗.

Now, the next steps are clear:

• Migrate Helmfile to Flux and figure out how bootstrap it without network.
• Learn how to use the awesome tool called Hauler ↗ (GitHub).
• Install the charts. Mainly Forgejo, but this time with actions runners!
• Figure out how persist data and backup with Borg efficiently. (because running tar and then 7z monthly via SSH is not nice)

And for motivation, stick your eyes to this beautiful landscape!

Thanks for reading.

I am glad that I like YAML syntax.