Minoko Labs

If you’ve ever run kubectl describe node on your control plane and wondered about this taint: Taints: node-role.kubernetes.io/control-plane:NoSchedule Here’s what it does and why you want to keep it. What It Does This taint prevents regular pods from being scheduled on control plane nodes. Only pods that explicitly tolerate the taint can run there. Why It Matters Your control plane runs critical components: etcd - The cluster’s brain (all state lives here) kube-apiserver - The API everything talks to kube-controller-manager - Manages controllers kube-scheduler - Decides where pods run If a misbehaving application pod consumes all CPU or memory on the control plane, these components starve and your entire cluster becomes unresponsive. ...

etcd is the heart of a Kubernetes cluster - it stores all cluster state including deployments, secrets, configmaps, and PVC definitions. Losing etcd means losing your entire cluster configuration. Yet many homelab setups neglect etcd backups until it’s too late. This post walks through setting up automated etcd backups using a Kubernetes CronJob that uploads snapshots to MinIO. The Challenge etcd runs as a static pod on the control plane node, which makes backing it up trickier than a regular application: ...

How I automated Kubernetes cluster upgrades using Ansible, turning a tedious multi-hour process into a single command. The Problem My homelab Kubernetes cluster was running v1.28, several versions behind the current stable release. Kubernetes only supports upgrading one minor version at a time, meaning I’d need to go through: 1.28 → 1.29 → 1.30 → 1.31 → 1.32 Each upgrade involves: Upgrading the control plane (kubeadm, then kubelet/kubectl) Draining each worker node Upgrading packages on each worker Uncordoning and waiting for Ready state Verifying cluster health Doing this manually across 4 nodes, 4 times, is tedious and error-prone. Enter Ansible. ...

How I set up automated cloud backups for my homelab Kubernetes cluster using MinIO and Scaleway, while avoiding US and German cloud providers. The Problem I run a Kubernetes homelab with PostgreSQL and ImmuDB databases. Daily backups run via CronJobs and store compressed dumps in MinIO (self-hosted S3-compatible storage). But what happens if my server dies? All my backups would be gone. I needed offsite cloud backup, but wanted to avoid: ...