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Technical deep-dives from building the minicloud platform — GitOps, Kubernetes, AI, and bare-metal engineering.

kubernetes
Automating ConfigMap Reloads: Why We Added Stakater Reloader

Kubernetes does not automatically restart pods when a mounted ConfigMap changes — especially when using subPath mounts. We added Stakater Reloader to eliminate manual kubectl rollout restart calls across Homer, LiteLLM, SearXNG, and Backstage. Here's the problem, the fix, and a bonus ArgoCD OOMKill investigation we uncovered along the way.

gitops
argocd
platform-engineering
Jul 16, 20265 min read
kubernetes
Platform Engineering on a Budget: Running Production Kubernetes on 5 ThinkPads

How I built a production-grade Kubernetes platform on five bare-metal ThinkPad laptops — with MAAS provisioning, GitOps, SSO, observability, and AI services — and what I learned about real platform engineering along the way.

platform-engineering
devops
k3s
Jul 13, 20265 min read