Kubernetes is not just for Black Friday
You self-host services at home, but upgrades break things, rollbacks require SSH-ing in to kill containers manually, and there's no safety net if your hardware fails.
Thibault Martin, Director of Program Development at the Matrix Foundation, walked this exact path — from Docker Compose to Podman with Ansible to Kubernetes on a single server — and explains why each transition happened and what it solved.
In this interview:
- Why Ansible's declarative promise fell short with the Podman collection, forcing sequential imperative steps instead of desired-state definitions
- How community Helm charts replace the need to write and maintain every manifest yourself
- Why GitOps isn't just a deployment workflow — it's a disaster recovery strategy when your infrastructure lives in your living room
- How k3s removes the barrier to entry by bundling opinionated defaults so you can skip choosing CNI plugins and storage providers
Kubernetes doesn't have to be enterprise-scale — with the right distribution and community tooling, it can be a practical, low-overhead choice for anyone who cares about their data.