The Thanos logo. It is a T in a square with some squares under the T. Below that is the 'Thanos' name.

Setting up Thanos for Metrics Storage

At the time of writing, I have 328 GiB of Prometheus data. When it all started, I had about 250 GiB. I could stop gathering more data whenever I like. 😅 So I’ve got a lot of Prometheus data. Especially since I started the Kubernetes cluster - or rather, since I started scraping it - I had to regularly increase the size of the storage volume for Prometheus. This might very well be due to my 5 year retention. But part of it, as it will turn out later, was because some of the things I was scraping had a 10s scrape interval configured. ...

May 18, 2025 · 30 min · Michael
A picture of a table laden with Raspberry Pi components. There is three of most things. Three 500 GB Kioxia NVMe SSDs. Three Raspberry Pi 5 8Gb. Three official Pi 5 27W power supplies. Three Pimoroni NVMe baseplates. The one exception are the Racknex mounting plates. Of those there are six. Also visible in the foreground is a Hama precision screwdriver set.

Migrating my Kubernetes Control Plane to Raspberry Pi 5

I’ve had problems with the stability of my Kubernetes control plane ever since I migrated it to three Raspberry Pi 4 from their temporary home on a beefy x86 server. I will be going into more detail about the problem first, describe the Pi 5 with NVMe a bit, and then describe the migration itself. The problem I’ve noted in a couple of the last posts that I’ve started seeing instability in my Kubernetes control plane. The main symptom I saw were my HashiCorp Vault Pods going down regularly. This was pretty visible because I have not automated unsealing for Vault, so each time the Pods are restarted, I have to manually enter the unseal passphrase. ...

May 12, 2025 · 23 min · Michael

Sammelsurium I

Wherein I write down things that don’t feel like they should be their own post. My blogging notes are starting to really fill up with small topics I’d like to write about, but which don’t feel like they warrant their own post. On the other hand, they also don’t feel ephemeral enough to just be a Fediverse post. So I decided to introduce the Sammelsurium, which is the German word for a random collection of things. ...

May 1, 2025 · 5 min · Michael

What's next after the K8s Migration?

Wherein I go over my future plans for the Homelab, now that the k8s migration is finally done. So it’s done. The k8s migration is finally complete, and I can now get started with some other projects. Or, well, I can once I’ve updated my control plane Pis to Pi 5 with NVMe SSDs. But what to do then? As it turns out, I’ve got a very full backlog. I’m decidedly not in danger of boredom. ...

April 29, 2025 · 18 min · Michael
The HashiCorp Nomad and Kubernetes logos, connected with an arrow pointing from Nomad to Kubernetes

Nomad to k8s, Final: It's done

Wherein I try to draw a conclusion about my migration to k8s. This is the final part of my k8s migration series. After a total of 26 posts, this will be the last one in the migration series. On the evening of April 13th, after one year, three months and 26 days, I set the final task of my k8s migration plan to “Done”. I made the first commits for the migration on December 19th 2023, shortly after starting my Christmas vacation that year. It was the addition of the first VMs, for the control plane nodes. I already did some experimentation in November, but I don’t count that as time spend for the migration. ...

April 24, 2025 · 13 min · Michael