Beyond The Cert 👋

I sat down Sunday evening to do something small: add a second node to a Kubernetes cluster I use for CKS exam prep. One terraform apply. That was the whole plan. By the time it was actually fixed, it was Wednesday. What Actually Happened Monday morning, normal routine. Fasted cardio, coffee, and while I was drinking that coffee I figured I’d check in on the node I added the night before. ...

Claude R. Hector | beyondthecert.dev | August 2026 The Learning Path The plan was deliberate: Pass CKA (January 2026) — Understand Kubernetes conceptually Kubernetes the Hard Way (March 2026) — Build it from scratch, understand each component and the internals Bare-metal cluster (April 2026) — Operate real infrastructure, not labs After CKA and KTHW, building a homelab cluster made sense. I saw people like Mischa van den Burg building clusters on old hardware as homelabs. That inspired me to try my own approach. ...

By the time TC-003 came around I’d already proven my Ansible playbooks could stand up a working Kubernetes cluster. One machine, one run, clean output. Figured that was the hard part done. TC-003 — my third test case for validating this automation across different hardware — was supposed to be the easy step before going public with the repo. Lenovo M920Q as the control plane, a Dell laptop joined as the worker, same playbooks that already worked once. Run it, confirm it still works, ship it. ...

Last weekend I moved apartments. Five Kubernetes nodes, a NAS, and a switch came with me. By the time I was done unpacking boxes, the cluster was already back online — and I barely had to touch the network configuration to make it happen. That wasn’t luck. Months ago, when I first built this cluster, I already knew a move was on the table at some point — nothing concrete, just the normal background awareness that apartments don’t last forever. So I made a deliberate call: route the whole cluster over Tailscale IPs instead of local network addresses. I figured if the day ever came, I didn’t want to be reconfiguring DHCP reservations and static routes while also carrying boxes down three flights of stairs. ...

When people ask me what made me decide to automate my homelab cluster, they expect a story about frustration — some late night where everything broke and I snapped. That’s not what happened. The first time I built a bare metal Kubernetes cluster manually, it took me a week and countless hours. Manual steps, configuration files, troubleshooting, and learning. And when it was done, I looked at it and thought: the next evolution of this is automation. Not because I was tired of doing it manually — but because I wanted to be able to reproduce it at a moment’s notice. ...