Field notes

Field notes from infrastructure, security and automation work

Technical decisions, implementation notes and lessons worth keeping. Topics can overlap because real systems rarely stay inside one category.

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GuideInfrastructure Self-Hosting #Observability #Prometheus #Loki #Grafana #Kubernetes #Reliability

What watches the platform: Prometheus, Loki and Grafana

Observability pipeline: a forwarding Prometheus and Promtail on the apps cluster send metrics and logs over the private network to Prometheus, Loki and Grafana on the tooling cluster

How metrics and logs travel from the application clusters to the tooling clusters, what the Grafana dashboards show, and how backup freshness gets checked twice a day.

Orthrus IT12 August 2026

Field NoteInfrastructure Automation #Kubernetes #UAT #Production #GitHub Actions #Payload CMS #Next.js

How a change to this site reaches production

Release path from a GitHub Actions build to a private registry, an import into containerd, a backup and drift check, a rollout with migrations, UAT checks and production

The release path of this site: an image built once per commit, tested in UAT against the live cluster state, then promoted to production without a rebuild.

Orthrus IT11 August 2026

Case StudyInfrastructure Self-Hosting Cloud #Kubernetes #k3s #Platform engineering #Cloudflare Tunnel #Kustomize #Backup & recovery

What runs where on the shared Kubernetes platform

Map of four single-node k3s clusters: an apps cluster and a tooling cluster for UAT and for production, Cloudflare Tunnel into the apps clusters and private-network links to tooling

A working map of the platform behind this site: four single-node k3s clusters, how requests reach them, how their configuration lives in Git and where the backups go.

Orthrus IT10 August 2026