Blog - MattBits

I getting started with and replacing my nomad orchestrator with Kubernetes Starting off Kubernertes comes in various flavours for deployment purposes. Given this is a kick-off, I am going with k3s for the controllers - starting with 1, but scaling to 3. I currently use nomad datacenters Network One of the things that stung and stuck with me from Rancher (the k8s version) was the network policies. Using kube-proxy, network polcieis and incredible amounts of CPU usage.

🧾 1. INFRASTRUCTURE EVOLUTION TIMELINE (HIGH LEVEL) Era Approx timeframe Key characteristics Core systems Early server era (pre-~2007 → unknown) First exposure to servers, NT domain Compaq Windows NT server Early homelab / ESX era ~2007–2013 Physical servers, early virtualization (RAM constrained) DL380 G3 (x3), DL360 G3, ESX/vCenter, Whitebox NAS Expansion / distributed experimentation ~2012–2016 Multi-server lab, PXE booting experiments, Jenkins (sheila) x3455 servers, DL160 G6 (later), fileserver VPS High-Availability Era ~2018 Multi-provider VPS cluster, Mesh VPN, HA MariaDB Tinc, OpenVPN, Docker Swarm, HAProxy Identity foundation era ~2016 First stable Linux identity system FreeIPA (marge/homer) Datacentre / colo era ~2017–2018 Formal cluster + SAN deployment DL160 G6 cluster, Nexsan SAN Consolidation era ~2018–2019 Transition (ThinkCentre) $\to$ R620/R720xd consolidation ThinkCentre, R620, R720xd, Synology, Keycloak Platform orchestration era ~2019–2024 Container orchestration, Rancher, early automation GitLab (Rancher), Jenkins systems Modern orchestration era ~2024–2026 Nomad-based unified service plane Nomad, Consul, Vault, Keycloak migration 🧾 1.