The Cost of Saying "I'm Still Here"
Control-plane eMMCs take 13–15 GB a day. Most of it is etcd recording twenty leases saying they're still alive, at about 22 KB a time.
Getting etcd's Metrics Out of Talos
etcd on Talos is not a pod, so nothing scraped it. One patch, a restart Talos refuses, a rolling reboot, and alerts so the metrics can't go quiet.
Wear Without Writes
One NVMe's reported wear sped up 4.5× the evening its writes almost stopped. Its spare blocks and error counters say the flash never noticed.
Teaching Prometheus to Read an eMMC
A flat line can mean a healthy eMMC or a dead collector. An arm64 exporter, eleven tested alert rules and a dashboard that tell the two apart.
The Disk With No S.M.A.R.T.
Six months of drive monitoring pointed at the wrong device. The one doing three times the writes has no S.M.A.R.T. at all.
Cluster-Wide Certificate Expiry Monitoring
cert-manager covered 18 certificates. Thirteen more had no owner and five expire on one day. Closing the gap with x509-certificate-exporter.
The Wear That Wasn't
An NVMe alert at 82% used life, on drives with full spare capacity and zero errors. The wear number turned out to be a clock, not an odometer.
The Traefik Dashboard That Routed to Itself
A dashboard broken since March turned out to be a memory amplifier. One visit took Traefik to 4 GB and hung a node.
The Alert That Named a Pod
A Prometheus alert named a pod IP, not a machine. The 'broken' label turned out to have logged every cluster-wide reboot for three months.
CloudNativePG Part 8: Two TLS Worlds and the Name Between Them
One PostgreSQL connection, two certificate authorities: a public CA proves the server while CloudNativePG keeps its internal CA for client certificates.
CloudNativePG Part 7: Turning Off the Thing You Built Four Months Ago
Deleting the legacy PostgreSQL instance took four commands. Proving it was safe to delete took a day and eleven read-only checks.
CloudNativePG Part 6: Migrating Umami Without Losing a Row
Moving a live 10 MB database onto CloudNativePG in under six minutes, and proving the verification harness could actually fail before trusting it.