Kubernetes on Casey Robb

Thirty Apps, One Repo: Anatomy of a GitOps Homelab Cluster

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 19:30:00 -0600

Thirty Apps, One Repo: Anatomy of a GitOps Homelab Cluster

Somewhere between running my first app on Kubernetes and running my thirtieth, the problem changed shape. It stopped being “how do I deploy this” and became “how do I know what my cluster is, and how do I change it without nuking & paving.” My answer is a single GitLab repo gitlab.com/caseyrobb/iac: one ApplicationSet generator, one allowlist per cluster, one thin wrapper chart per app, and a handful of infrastructure operators doing the rest. The production cluster, chaos (k0s, six nodes on mini PCs at home — no, the name is not prophetic; mostly), runs thirty-two apps out of that repo and has never had a kubectl apply from a human.

Serving OpenShift VIPs from OpenBSD: relayd, pf, and unbound as Your Cluster's Load Balancer

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 18:45:00 -0600

Serving OpenShift VIPs from OpenBSD: relayd, pf, and unbound

OpenShift is unusual among Kubernetes distros in how much it demands from your network before it will install itself: three virtual IPs (API, internal API, and wildcard ingress), DNS that resolves all three before the first node boots, and a healthcheck contract for your load balancer that is spelled out almost to the millisecond in the install docs. In the cloud this is someone else’s problem, on bare metal it is yours.

Using OpenBSD's OpenBGPD and Cilium for k0s Networking

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 13:31:00 -0700

Using OpenBSD’s OpenBGPD and Cilium for k0s Networking

If you’re running a bare-metal or on-premises Kubernetes cluster, one of the biggest challenges is making your services accessible to the rest of your network. While NodePorts and traditional reverse proxies work, running BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) natively gives you a much more elegant, scalable, and true-to-cloud experience.

In this post, we’ll walk through how to configure an OpenBSD router running OpenBGPD to peer with a k0s Kubernetes cluster using Cilium as the CNI (Container Network Interface). This allows Cilium to announce LoadBalancer IP pools and Pod CIDRs directly to your network’s core router.