Cluster bootstrapping

Day One: Bootstrapping a k3s Cluster with Terraform and Ansible

TL;DR Today was cluster genesis. Starting from 3 bare Proxmox hosts, I built the entire infrastructure-as-code pipeline: Terraform to provision VMs from cloud-init templates, Ansible to configure and bootstrap k3s, and a full GitOps deployment model with SOPS-encrypted secrets and S3-backed Terraform state. By end of day: 3 server nodes, 3 agent nodes, cert-manager with Route53 DNS-01 validation, and self-hosted GitHub Actions runners on the cluster itself. The Architecture The design goal was simple: everything as code, nothing manual, everything reproducible. ...

February 8, 2026 · 6 min · zolty