Kubernetes - Adventures - Pilot

My Kubernetes Journey: From a Fragile Single-Node Setup to a Stable GitOps-Powered Homelab Cluster A few years back, I dipped my toes into Kubernetes by spinning up a simple lab cluster: one control-plane node, one worker, and a handful of basic services. To my surprise, that minimal setup ran reliably with almost zero maintenance for about two and a half years. Then it suddenly broke. That failure became the catalyst for a complete rebuild. I set out to create a proper development cluster—one control-plane node and three workers—using a vanilla kubeadm installation. Over the next three months, I methodically reproduced every common pitfall I could find, reinstalling repeatedly until the process felt rock-solid and repeatable. Early on, I shifted toward GitOps practices. I built CI/CD pipelines that handled every cluster change and installation step, relying heavily on kubectl to apply manifests directly. This approach gave me confidence and speed, turning deployments into automated, v