Bare Metal First, Cloud at the Edge — Our Hybrid Architecture Decision
Most Kubernetes tutorials start with eksctl create cluster or gcloud container clusters create. A managed control plane, auto-scaling node groups, load balancers that appear with a single annotation. The cloud abstracts the hardware entirely.
We went the other direction. Five physical machines — four ThinkPad laptops and a 2012 MacBook Pro — running k3s, with every workload scheduled and operated by us. No managed control plane. No auto-scaling node group. No cloud load balancer. Just Linux, containerd, and Flannel on iron we can touch.
But we do use cloud services. AWS delivers our email. Cloudflare sits in front of every HTTP request. A Lightsail instance relays our video call UDP traffic. Tailscale connects us to the cluster from anywhere.
This post explains how we decided what goes where, and why the resulting architecture is not a compromise — it is a deliberate design.