Homelab

After migrating to Talos Linux, I had an immutable operating system—but I was still managing Kubernetes applications the old way. kubectl apply -f everywhere. Configuration files scattered across my laptop. “Did I deploy this? What version am I running? How did I configure that?” Six months from now, I’d have no idea how to reproduce my setup. GitOps solved this. My entire homelab infrastructure lives in a Git repository. Every change is a commit, every deployment automatic, every configuration versioned. I can destroy the cluster and rebuild it exactly from one repository. ...

I ran K3s on Ubuntu for over a year. The main problem was configuration drift—SSH into a node to fix something, install a debug package, edit a config file directly. Six months later, the cluster works but I can’t reproduce the setup. Talos Linux is different. It’s an operating system designed specifically for Kubernetes with no interactive shell and no SSH support. This greatly reduces the attack surface and eliminates the possibility of manual configuration changes. Every modification goes through a versioned configuration file applied via API. ...