Kubernetes

Series: How I Used Claude Code to Slash My Cloud Bill by 63% Part 1: The $198/Month Wake-Up Call (you are here) Part 2: Migrating 7 Static Sites to Cloudflare Pages Part 3: Killing the Load Balancer with Cloudflare Tunnel Part 4: Building a Home Router with a Raspberry Pi 5 Part 5: Connecting Everything with Tailscale Part 6: The Final Architecture - $74/mo and Zero Regrets The Moment I Noticed I’ve been running everything in DigitalOcean since I decided to ditch my home equipment years ago. The appeal was “set it and forget it” – no hardware failures at 2 AM, no power outages taking down my sites, no maintaining physical boxes. And for years, it worked. My bill hovered around $125/month and I didn’t think twice about it. ...

A Kubernetes Secret is not actually secret. That’s a hard sentence to sit with, especially if you’ve been dutifully creating Secret objects and patting yourself on the back for not hardcoding credentials in your ConfigMap. The problem runs deeper than most teams realize, and it doesn’t get fixed by following the basic Kubernetes documentation. This post is about what actually works, at different scales, with honest tradeoffs for each approach. ...

It started with a misconfigured CI runner. A developer had a Jenkins pipeline building Docker images. The container ran as root. A dependency had a known RCE vulnerability. When the exploit landed, the attacker had root inside the container, and because that process was root, they also had root on the host. They pivoted to the secrets store, grabbed credentials, and spent three weeks inside the network before anyone noticed. ...

Container Networking Deep Dive: From Network Namespaces to Kubernetes Note: This guide is based on the Linux kernel networking documentation, Docker networking documentation (v24+), Kubernetes networking model documentation (v1.28+), and CNI specification v1.0. All examples use documented networking primitives and follow production container networking patterns. Container networking is fundamental to modern cloud-native applications. Understanding how packets flow from pod to pod, how services load-balance traffic, and how network policies enforce security requires knowledge of Linux networking primitives, Container Network Interface (CNI) plugins, and Kubernetes networking abstractions. ...

Update (January 2026): The package versions in this tutorial were current as of March 2024. While the concepts and approach remain valid, you should check for newer versions of the tools mentioned (Hadolint, Terrascan, pre-commit hooks, etc.). Most importantly, update actions/checkout@v3 to actions/checkout@v4 in your workflows - v3 uses deprecated Node.js 16. As I continue this series on CI/CD pipeline security, it is time to now work on securely building and deploying our application. This post picks up where my Build Secure Python Pipelines: Adding Tests and Hooks in Action post left off. ...