Hey everyone! And welcome back. The journey to deepen my skills in software engineering and cloud-native technologies continues. Recently, I embarked on a project to redeploy my personal website, paulojauregui.com, onto an Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE) cluster. I was hosting it locally from my Kubernetes cluster that lives in my closet, and while fun and educative this experience was, it was not without its pitfalls. Namely, if/when I broke my internet by playing around with my server, my site would become unavailable. To accomplish this, we would continue using a complete GitOps approach with Argo CD, ensuring automated SSL with Cert-Manager, and navigating the real-world challenges that come with it. I’m excited to share the process, the hurdles, and the “aha!” moments.

As someone passionate about diving deeper into cloud-native technologies and aiming for a career pivot into software or machine learning engineering, getting hands-on experience with Kubernetes in a real cloud environment was high on my list. The challenge? Doing it without breaking the bank. The solution? Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s (OCI) “Always Free” tier and its Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE)!

In this post, I’ll walk you through my journey of setting up a two-node OKE cluster, leveraging those free resources, and navigating the inevitable troubleshooting that comes with any ambitious tech project. My goal wasn’t just to get a cluster running, but to understand the nuts and bolts, especially the networking, which is so crucial in the cloud.

A complete GitOps approach to hosting your personal site securely from home

For those of us who maintain homelab environments, one of the greatest challenges is securely exposing services to the internet without compromising our home network. In this post, I’ll walk through how I set up my personal website using Hugo, hosted on a K3s Kubernetes cluster, and securely exposed to the internet via Cloudflare Tunnels — all following GitOps principles.