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src/content/blog/day-003-kubernetes-flux-gitops.md

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+---
+title: "Day 3 — Kubernetes on Bare Metal, Flux GitOps, and Why I Stopped Using k3s"
+description: "Graduating from k3s to full kubeadm, setting up Flux CD for GitOps, and the first taste of what Longhorn storage actually means."
+pubDate: 2024-11-15
+day: 3
+tags: ["kubernetes", "flux", "gitops", "longhorn", "k8s"]
+---
+
+## Why Not k3s Forever?
+
+k3s is excellent. I used it for two months and it worked fine. I moved to full Kubernetes (kubeadm) for one reason: I wanted the experience to transfer directly to production environments. At work we don't run k3s. The extra complexity of kubeadm is the point.
+
+## The Install
+
+```bash
+# kubeadm init on control plane
+sudo kubeadm init \
+  --pod-network-cidr=10.244.0.0/16 \
+  --control-plane-endpoint="k8s-control.int.h0melab.uk"
+
+# CNI — went with Cilium over Flannel for eBPF goodness
+helm install cilium cilium/cilium --namespace kube-system
+```
+
+## Flux GitOps
+
+This was the decision that changed everything. Instead of `kubectl apply`-ing manifests, every change goes through Git:
+
+```
+homelab-k8s/
+├── clusters/homelab/
+│   ├── flux-system/      ← Flux's own manifests
+│   ├── infrastructure/   ← Traefik, Longhorn, cert-manager
+│   └── apps/             ← Actual workloads
+```
+
+The golden rule I established here: **Chart.yaml version bumps are required for Flux to pick up Helm chart changes.** Forgot this approximately 15 times before it became instinct.
+
+## Longhorn
+
+Distributed block storage across three worker nodes. The UI is surprisingly good. The first time I watched a volume replica heal itself after a node reboot, I understood why people write blog posts about storage.
+
+```yaml
+# The PVC pattern I use for everything
+apiVersion: v1
+kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
+metadata:
+  name: app-data
+  annotations:
+    helm.sh/resource-policy: keep   # ← never delete this on helm uninstall
+spec:
+  storageClassName: longhorn
+  accessModes: [ReadWriteOnce]
+  resources:
+    requests:
+      storage: 10Gi
+```
+
+The `helm.sh/resource-policy: keep` annotation saved my data at least twice when I was iterating on Helm releases.
+
+## What's Next
+
+Day 4 covers the monitoring stack — Netdata agents, VictoriaMetrics as the TSDB, and getting Grafana to look like something I'd actually want to stare at during an incident.