Kubernetes on Chris Wagner

How I Actually Make Trade-off Calls — Not Just What I Build

cw@wagner.org.za (Chrisando Wagner) — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve already read the build logs — the k3s cluster, the storage classes, the failover drill — you know what I build. This post is about the part that doesn’t show up in a terraform apply output: how I actually decide something, in the moment a plan stops matching reality, and what I do about it afterward.

That’s a different question than “what technology did you pick,” and it’s the one I think actually separates senior from principal-level work. Anyone competent can execute a plan that goes to schedule. What I’m going to walk through is a plan that didn’t, twenty minutes into a homelab rebuild, and the small, unglamorous decision that followed it — because that decision is a better sample of how I’ll behave on your platform than any tool list is.

What I Build — A Technical Services Profile

cw@wagner.org.za (Chrisando Wagner) — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve landed here from LinkedIn or a referral, this is the longer answer to “what do you actually do?”

The short version: I design and build infrastructure, and increasingly I’m the one deciding what infrastructure gets built. I have done so for 25 years — across datacentres, managed service environments, banking platforms, and my own homelab — using everything from Windows Server and VMware to OpenStack, Red Hat, and modern cloud-native stacks on Kubernetes. My current role is setting cloud and containerisation strategy for a regulated banking platform: the reference architectures other engineering teams build against, the guardrails that keep a POPIA and PCI-DSS environment audit-ready, and the FinOps governance that keeps cloud spend accountable at group level.

Building an HA k3s Control Plane on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS: Terraform, Ansible, kube-vip, and a Real Failover Drill

cw@wagner.org.za (Chrisando Wagner) — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is the latest iteration of my homelab automation: Terraform provisions six Ubuntu 24.04 LTS VMs on Proxmox, Ansible turns three of them into an HA k3s control plane with embedded etcd and a kube-vip floating VIP, and ArgoCD takes over GitOps management of everything above the OS the moment the cluster is up. It’s IaC end to end — nothing in this post was clicked into existence, and the two commands that matter (terraform apply, ansible-playbook site.yml) are the only manual steps in the whole build.

GitOps Reached Maturity in 2026 — Here's What That Actually Looks Like Running Your Own Blog

cw@wagner.org.za (Chrisando Wagner) — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Somewhere in the last year, “GitOps” quietly stopped being a talk track at KubeCon and started being the thing platform teams assume is already in place before a project even gets a name. Argo and Flux both sit at CNCF graduated status now, the highest maturity tier the foundation hands out, and the conference circuit has moved on from “should you adopt GitOps” to “how do you build a self-service golden path on top of it.” That’s the industry’s definition of maturity: a pattern boring enough that nobody has to argue for it any more.

I Run Kubernetes for a Bank and at Home. Here's When You Shouldn't.

cw@wagner.org.za (Chrisando Wagner) — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every eighteen months or so, the same argument does a lap of the internet. Someone writes “we moved off Kubernetes and cut our infra bill by 60%.” A few months later, someone else writes “we moved back to Kubernetes and here’s why.” Both posts get the same engagement, both are right about their own environment, and both get quoted afterwards as if they’d settled something universal. Neither side did.

I’m writing this because I sit on both ends of that argument at the same time, every day, and I don’t think either tribe is being honest with the other.

Progressive Delivery with Kargo: Warehouses, Freight, and Blue-Green Promotions

cw@wagner.org.za (Chrisando Wagner) — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How This Blog Is Served walked through the full path from git push to a served page, touching every layer along the way. This post stays in one place: Kargo, the piece that sits between “CI built a new image” and “ArgoCD is told to deploy it.” It’s the part of the pipeline most likely to look like magic from the outside, so this is a proper look at what it’s actually doing — plus a couple of real gotchas hit while getting auto-promotion working correctly.

How This Blog Is Served — Kubernetes, Gateway API, and a Full GitOps Pipeline

cw@wagner.org.za (Chrisando Wagner) — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This blog runs on a self-hosted k3s cluster, served through a Cloudflare proxy, routed via the Kubernetes Gateway API, and deployed using a fully automated GitOps pipeline. This post walks through exactly how a git push to main makes it to your browser — from webhook to blue-green promotion.

Source: git.wagner.org.za/cw/blog

The Full Picture
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Before diving into each layer, here is the end-to-end flow:

Homelab Part 4 - k3s Automation

cw@wagner.org.za (Chrisando Wagner) — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In Part 3 we deployed k3s manually — great for understanding what each piece does, but not something you want to repeat. This post automates the entire thing: Terraform provisions the VMs, Ansible configures them and installs k3s + Cilium, and ArgoCD bootstraps itself and takes over GitOps management of the full cluster stack.

Source: git.wagner.org.za/homelab/k3s-proxmox-automation

Architecture
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┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Proxmox Host │
│ │
│ ┌─────────────────┐ ┌───────────────┐ ┌───────────────┐ ┌────────────┐ │
│ │ k3s-controller │ │ k3s-worker-01 │ │ k3s-worker-02 │ │k3s-worker │ │
│ │ 172.16.10.1 │ │ 172.16.10.2 │ │ 172.16.10.3 │ │172.16.10.4 │ │
│ │ 8 cores / 16 GB │ │ 16c / 32 GB │ │ 16c / 32 GB │ │16c / 32 GB │ │
│ │ vda: 200 GB │ │ vda: 200 GB │ │ vda: 200 GB │ │vda: 200 GB │ │
│ │ │ │ vdb: 512 GB │ │ vdb: 512 GB │ │vdb: 512 GB │ │
│ │ k3s server │ │ vdc: 512 GB │ │ vdc: 512 GB │ │vdc: 512 GB │ │
│ │ Cilium / ArgoCD │ │ k3s agent │ │ k3s agent │ │k3s agent │ │
│ └────────┬────────┘ └──────┬────────┘ └──────┬────────┘ └─────┬──────┘ │
│ └───────────────-──┴──────────────────┴────────────-────┘ │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

graph TB subgraph Proxmox["Proxmox Host"] C["k3s-controller-01
172.16.10.1
8c / 16 GB
vda: 200 GB OS
─────────────
k3s server
Cilium · ArgoCD"] W1["k3s-worker-01
172.16.10.2
16c / 32 GB
vda: 200 GB OS
vdb: 512 GB DirectPV
vdc: 512 GB Longhorn
─────────────
k3s agent"] W2["k3s-worker-02
172.16.10.3
16c / 32 GB
vda: 200 GB OS
vdb: 512 GB DirectPV
vdc: 512 GB Longhorn
─────────────
k3s agent"] W3["k3s-worker-03
172.16.10.4
16c / 32 GB
vda: 200 GB OS
vdb: 512 GB DirectPV
vdc: 512 GB Longhorn
─────────────
k3s agent"] end C -->|k3s API :6443| W1 C -->|k3s API :6443| W2 C -->|k3s API :6443| W3 C & W1 & W2 & W3 -->|eBGP AS 65000| R["Router
172.16.10.254"] R -->|advertises LB pool
172.16.1.0/24| NET["Network"]

Each worker gets three disks:

Kairos — Immutable Kubernetes OS

cw@wagner.org.za (Chrisando Wagner) — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Kairos
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Kairos is a cloud-native Linux meta-distribution for running Kubernetes. It brings the power of the public cloud to your on-premises environment. https://kairos.io/

Kairos is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation CNCF sandbox project.

Architecture
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Kairos is designed to be a lightweight, secure, and scalable solution for deploying Kubernetes clusters. It uses a combination of containerized components and a lightweight operating system to provide a highly available and fault-tolerant platform.

Homelab Part 3 - Kubernetes

cw@wagner.org.za (Chrisando Wagner) — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Kubernetes
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Kubernetes is a popular open-source container orchestration platform that automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerised applications. It provides a robust and scalable infrastructure for running microservices and containerised applications across multiple nodes.

Kubernetes is a powerful tool that enables developers to deploy, manage, and scale containerised applications across multiple nodes. It provides a declarative way to define the desired state of the application, and automatically manages the deployment, scaling, and health of the application.

Kubernetes on Chris Wagner

How I Actually Make Trade-off Calls — Not Just What I Build

What I Build — A Technical Services Profile

Building an HA k3s Control Plane on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS: Terraform, Ansible, kube-vip, and a Real Failover Drill

GitOps Reached Maturity in 2026 — Here's What That Actually Looks Like Running Your Own Blog

I Run Kubernetes for a Bank and at Home. Here's When You Shouldn't.

Progressive Delivery with Kargo: Warehouses, Freight, and Blue-Green Promotions

How This Blog Is Served — Kubernetes, Gateway API, and a Full GitOps Pipeline

The Full Picture #

Homelab Part 4 - k3s Automation

Architecture #

Kairos — Immutable Kubernetes OS

Kairos #

Architecture #

Homelab Part 3 - Kubernetes

Kubernetes #

The Full Picture
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Architecture
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Kairos
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Architecture
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Kubernetes
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