DEV Community: Nic Baughman

Week 3 - Learning K8s

Nic Baughman — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 14:23:10 +0000

Week 3 Recap

This was a pretty slow week of learning k8s. I've done a few small tests with HA but I haven't solved a couple issues. The first and primary issue is for some reason the swap settings are not sticking. Also, the HA control plane doesn't really look to be setup correctly.

The problem I'm having with HA is that for some reason when the primary control plane goes down, kubectl get nodes no longer works. I haven't had a chance to read docs or dig in and understand why that is the case. The other weird part that might be related to swap settings is that my VMs for control plane and workers end up locking up the host and making it inaccessible.

What's next?

Stability. I need to get my Proxmox cluster & these VMs to be more stable. Every morning when I wake up and check the cluster something is wrong. Either a VM has stopped, locked up, or the Proxmox host has crashed. I think I might be oversubscribing cpu threads between the VMs and Proxmox OS. I'm going to dial back the cores of my worker VMs and see if that stabilizes things.

Week 2 - Learning K8s

Nic Baughman — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 18:42:56 +0000

Week 2 Recap

I decided to use Claude for some help. Not to login and create the setup for me (although I will do that later). More to build me a guide so I can learn for myself. I had Claude create steps for me to complete a cluster configuration. Pretty straight forward.

After some iterations I was able to get a working flow. So now as I need more control planes or workers I can easily expand my cluster OR configure/setup a new cluster. Later on if I need a break from K8 I'll take a look at using Ansible to help me make this a more standard process.

But at the end of this week I had a 6 total vms deployed. Three were for a control plane, Three were worker nodes. I haven't quite made it through testing if I actually have an HA setup.

What's next?

Next week I want to test some of the HA functionality. Turn off some control planes, turn off some workers, etc. and see what happens. After that maybe deploy an App? I'm going to start with something stateless by design to simplify the components.

See you next week!

Week 1 - Learning K8s

Nic Baughman — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 15:10:23 +0000

I've wanted to learn Kubernetes (k8s) for a while now. Honestly, though, I have been so intimidated by it. At a high level, I understood the value, but at a practical level, I have always been completely lost.

So why k8s? Why learn it now, and for what purpose?

The compelling moment for me was due to some elements at work. I have been involved with Neoclouds for three years now, and managed Kubernetes with GPUs is a major feature/functionality in the space. Every day on prospect or partner calls, I hear how people want to use k8s to manage their compute easier.

The plan is that throughout the week, I will get hands-on experience working with k8s. Then, at the end of a week, I'll make a post sharing all the things I learned. The good and the bad. I assume no one will read this, but who knows, maybe this will be helpful to someone.

Week 1 Recap

This first week, I focused on the prep. I purchased some equipment, which all has arrived. I bought some switches to setup and utilize VLANs, I bought mini PCs to be my compute, and I installed Proxmox v9 on those hosts. I chose Proxmox because its an OS i’m familiar with and it gives me flexibility to spin up and down VMs as needed.

I decided to go all in with Mikrotik on the networking side. They make it pretty easy to create and manage VLANs. The process of going from ISP devices to my Mikrotik equipment was a learning experience in itself. I still don't understand some of it. That story is maybe for another day.

For Mini PCs, I choose M715q devices. I found a great offer on eBay for the M715q that has 8 threads and 16GB of RAM. This seemed like a perfect option to use in Proxmox as I could make a control plane and one worker. Or each machine can be broken into two workers per machine.

What’s next?

I hope to have created a small cluster by next week and begun setting up an HA control plane.