$ cat post/apt-get-from-the-past-/-the-heartbeat-skipped-at-cutover-/-no-rollback-existed.md
apt-get from the past / the heartbeat skipped at cutover / no rollback existed
Title: A DevOps Winter: Embracing Flux in a Kubernetes Fatigue World
February 10, 2020. The day the clouds of Kubernetes complexity fatigue finally seemed to part enough for us to see the light. Or rather, to embrace something new and simpler.
The morning began with a familiar groan as my coffee maker whirred to life. I glanced at the screen of my Chromebook, which was tracking its tenth user. The Chrome ID had become an unspoken badge of honor in the office; it meant you were essential enough to have your work machine tagged multiple times.
My mind wandered back to the early days when we deployed changes with a single command and didn’t have to think twice about it. Now, the mere thought of deploying even one pod sent shivers down my spine. We had grown so dependent on complex Helm charts and custom scripts that our ops engineers were spending more time managing infrastructure than writing code.
We needed something different, something to bring some sanity back into our workflow. Enter Flux, the GitOps solution that promised simplicity while maintaining robustness. I decided it was high time we gave it a shot.
The first few days were challenging. Our initial setup involved pulling in all sorts of dependencies and making sure every component talked to each other correctly. We ran into issues with version mismatches and conflicts between our Helm charts and Flux’s requirements. But as the weeks passed, things started to come together. I remember the day we managed to sync our application deployments from a Git repo—no more running kubectl apply commands or worrying about drift.
But then came the night of pain that would define my relationship with Flux for months: a simple merge conflict in our Kubernetes manifests caused us to lose access to our production environment for hours. It was a stark reminder that even with GitOps, human error can still trip you up.
We huddled over code, trying to figure out where things went wrong. I proposed moving away from custom Helm charts and using plain YAML files instead—simpler but more verbose. The team was skeptical at first, but eventually, we agreed it might be a good compromise.
That night, as I lay in bed listening to the rain pitter-patter outside my window, I realized how much the tech landscape had changed since the days of bare-metal servers and manual deployment. We were moving from an era of complexity to one where simplicity was king again—or at least it felt that way.
Looking back, those initial struggles with Flux taught us a valuable lesson: infrastructure as code is not just about automation; it’s also about ensuring our deployments remain understandable and manageable over time. The journey wasn’t easy, but the end result was worth it.
As I typed away in my .txt file of notes (a testament to my productivity), I couldn’t help but think about how far we’ve come since those early days. We’re not just dealing with tech; we’re shaping a culture that values simplicity and understanding over complexity for its own sake. And on this February morning, that felt like something worth celebrating.
The world outside continued its relentless march forward, with headlines about Gears and Wacom tablets and Google Maps hacks. But here in the quiet of my home office, I was more focused on getting our Flux setup just right. It might have been a winter for many tech companies, but for us, it felt like spring was finally on the horizon.