Erich Blume 40f220780d Review why-gitops doc: fix wiki-links, accuracy, add last-reviewed

- Fix misleading [[tailscale|Pulumi]] link → [[pulumi]]
- Simplify [[ansible|Ansible]] and [[argocd|ArgoCD]] to plain wiki-links
- Rename "Tailnet" layer to "Network" to reflect Pulumi's full scope (ACLs + DNS)
- Fix apt install → brew install (indri is macOS)
- Add [[pulumi]] to Related section
- Add last-reviewed frontmatter

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>

2026-02-13 16:47:28 -08:00

2.7 KiB

Raw Blame History

title

modified

last-reviewed

Why GitOps?

Note: This article was drafted by AI and reviewed by Erich. I plan to rewrite all explanatory content in my own words - these serve as placeholders to establish the documentation structure.

BlumeOps uses GitOps principles for managing personal infrastructure. This might seem like overkill for a homelab, but there are good reasons.

The Problem with Manual Infrastructure

Traditional server management involves SSHing into machines and running commands. This works, but creates problems:

Drift: The actual state diverges from what you think it is
Amnesia: You forget what you changed and why
Fragility: One bad command can break things with no easy rollback
Bus factor: Only you know how it works (even AI assistants struggle without context)

Git as the Source of Truth

GitOps inverts the model: instead of pushing changes to servers, you commit desired state to Git, and automation pulls it into reality.

Benefits:

Every change is tracked with commit history
Pull requests enable review before deployment
Rollback is just git revert
The repo is the documentation

Why This Matters for a Homelab

A personal homelab isn't a production environment, but it shares the same challenges:

Memory is unreliable - Six months from now, you won't remember why you configured Caddy that way
Experimentation is constant - You try things, break things, want to undo things
AI assistance needs context - Claude can help much more effectively when it can read your infrastructure as code

The BlumeOps Approach

BlumeOps uses layered GitOps:

Layer	Tool	What it manages
Network	pulumi	Tailscale ACLs, tags; Gandi DNS
Host config	ansible	Services on indri
Kubernetes	argocd	Containerized workloads

Each layer has its own reconciliation loop:

Pulumi applies on mise run tailnet-up
Ansible applies on mise run provision-indri
ArgoCD watches Git and syncs manually or automatically

Trade-offs

GitOps isn't free:

Learning curve - You need to understand Ansible, ArgoCD, Pulumi
Indirection - Can't just brew install something; need to add it to config
Complexity - More moving parts than a simple server

But for BlumeOps, the trade-off is worth it. The infrastructure is complex enough that managing it imperatively would be error-prone, and the GitOps approach enables effective AI-assisted operations.

architecture - How the pieces fit together
pulumi - Network infrastructure as code
argocd - Kubernetes GitOps
ansible - Host configuration

2.7 KiB Raw Blame History