One of my favorite self-hosted apps running on my cluster is Mealie — a recipe manager that’s become a staple in our household. Sure, there are plenty of recipe apps out there, but Mealie does something that really sets it apart for me: it lets me import recipes from the web, store my own creations, … Read more
After successfully setting up my wildcard certificate using cert-manager (as I covered in my previous guide), I decided to take the next step — deploying my personal WordPress site, thedougie.com, on my Kubernetes cluster. By switching to Cloudflared and Traefik (see my recent post), I’ve eliminated the need for firewall holes to expose services directly, … Read more
By switching to Cloudflared, I was able to remove the firewall rules I originally had that allowed external traffic from Cloudflare’s network to communicate directly with my cluster.This not only simplifies the overall design but also adds another layer of security to the setup. As with any technology, things are constantly evolving and changing. I … Read more
If you’re running Kubernetes and want automatic HTTPS for your services, cert-manager is one of the best tools available. It integrates directly with Let’s Encrypt to handle certificate requests, renewals, and management. In my setup, I wanted to: To make the process easier to repeat, I split the configuration into four Ansible playbooks: cert-manager Helm … Read more
When I first set up Kubernetes on my bare-metal cluster, one of the first things I needed was a way to handle load balancing. Since I’m not using a cloud provider, I needed something that could assign external IPs directly on my local network — and MetalLB fit that role perfectly. Why I Chose MetalLB … Read more
When I first set up my Kubernetes cluster using OrangePi CM4 boards on the Turing Pi V2, storage was a challenge. Since the OrangePi CM4 didn’t support NVMe and SATA across the four nodes, I resorted to NFS mounts for persistent volume storage. While this worked, it wasn’t the most efficient solution, especially for performance-intensive … Read more
When managing Kubernetes on resource-constrained hardware like the Turing Pi V2, I’ve found that K3s is a great lightweight alternative to full-blown Kubernetes (K8s). It keeps things simple, removes unnecessary overhead, and works well with my RK1 nodes running Ubuntu Server. Since my cluster doesn’t consist of large, powerful servers, K3s provides the perfect balance … Read more
Recently, I received a replacement for one of my Turing Pi 2.4 boards that had a faulty slot. The replacement is the new Turing Pi 2.5, which brings several refinements over the previous version. While the Turing Pi 2.4 was already a solid board, the 2.5 revision introduces enhancements that improve overall usability, control, and … Read more
After a few months of playing with Kubernetes on the OrangePi CM4s, I realized that running anything requiring decent CPU power wasn’t going to work very well. For example, hosting WordPress wasn’t as viable as I had hoped. Granted, WordPress can be pretty resource-intensive, but still—it was a bottleneck. That’s why I eventually settled on … Read more
When I first got my Turing Pi V2 in January of 2023, it was incredibly difficult to find Raspberry Pi CM4s without paying scalper prices. Some sellers were asking around $200 per unit. So, I explored alternatives and found the OrangePi CM4. While not quite as powerful as the Raspberry Pi version, it had the … Read more
