The problem
Architecture decisions become more useful when they are informed by day-to-day operation: upgrades, configuration drift, service networking, and recovery.
My contribution
I maintain a GitOps-managed home environment for self-hosted applications and services. It gives me a practical place to work through Kubernetes operations and evaluate patterns that inform my platform engineering.
Engineering decisions
Keep desired state in Git
Declarative configuration and Flux make infrastructure changes reviewable and give ongoing reconciliation a defined source of truth.
Work through the operating details
Talos, Kubernetes networking, certificate management, and external secrets are part of the environment, alongside the applications that depend on them.
Use maintenance as feedback
Upgrades and troubleshooting provide concrete questions for future platform APIs, documentation, and automation.
Evidence & scope
My Gateway API article examines ownership boundaries between infrastructure, platform, and application teams, providing a public example of how I reason about Kubernetes networking.
An ongoing personal environment focused on operational learning and maintenance.