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ch15 is now an account of what's actually running, not a roadmap for what we'd add: VictoriaMetrics + Jaeger + Grafana on 88oakappsUpdate fronted by Cloudflare and bearer-gated nginx, vmagent in-cluster, the internal/prom histogram set, the rollout's NetworkPolicy footprint, the obs.88oakapps.com endpoint shape, the ~$0/700MB resource budget, and a token-rotation runbook. The "what we still don't have" section keeps log aggregation, alerting, and full distributed tracing as the honest gap list. Other touched docs: - 00-overview: \"deliberately absent\" no longer claims we have no metrics — calls out the cross-cluster shape instead. - 14-deployment-process: TL;DR now points at deploy-k3s/scripts/03-deploy.sh (full build + push + apply + obs vmagent), with the manual kubectl-set-image flow kept as the single-service path. Notes the IfNotPresent gotcha that bit us during the rollout. - 16-failure-modes: adds vmagent-can't-reach-obs and Grafana-no-data. - 18-cost: $0 line item for the obs stack on 88oakappsUpdate, with the CX32 migration trigger. - 17/18 README + appendix b: link the new ch15, add the obs cheat sheet block. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
honeyDue Production Deployment — The Book
This is the complete reference for the honeyDue production deployment as it exists on 2026-04-24. It serves two audiences:
- A new engineer learning the system for the first time. Start at Chapter 0 (Overview) and read in order. Concepts are built up; nothing is assumed beyond "you've deployed web apps before."
- The operator (future-you) needing a specific fact fast. Every chapter opens with a one-paragraph summary and has an operator runbook at its end. The appendices are a cheat sheet.
The deployment is non-trivial. It's a 3-node HA Kubernetes cluster running a Go API, a Next.js admin panel, a background worker, Redis, and Traefik — all fronted by Cloudflare, integrated with Neon Postgres, Backblaze B2, and a self-hosted Gitea registry. This book explains why each of those pieces was chosen (often over two or three alternatives we tried first), what they do, and how to operate them.
Table of Contents
Part I — The System
- 00 — Overview — what's running, at a glance
- 01 — Infrastructure — Hetzner nodes, specs, cost, region
- 02 — Orchestrator Choice — why k3s (and not Swarm, full k8s, or Nomad)
Part II — Networking
- 03 — Networking — flannel, CoreDNS, kube-proxy, the overlay story
- 04 — Firewall — every UFW rule on every node, rationale
- 13 — Cloudflare — DNS, SSL modes, round-robin origin pool
Part III — Security
- 05 — Security — RBAC, Pod Security, secrets, TLS chain
- 06 — Traefik Ingress — host-network DaemonSet, cert plan
Part IV — Workloads
- 07 — Services — api, admin, worker, redis per-service deep dive
- 08 — Database — Neon Postgres, advisory-lock migrations
- 09 — Storage — Backblaze B2, minio-go client details
- 10 — Secrets & Config — ConfigMap, Secret, env mapping
- 11 — Registry — Gitea container registry, multi-arch builds
Part V — Operation
- 12 — Data Flow — end-to-end request lifecycle
- 14 — Deployment Process — how to roll new code
- 15 — Observability — VictoriaMetrics + Jaeger + Grafana on
obs.88oakapps.com, vmagent in-cluster, Prometheus histograms in the Go API - 16 — Failure Modes — what happens when X dies
- 17 — Runbook — common ops tasks
Part VI — Context
- 18 — Cost — what this costs to run, per service
- 19 — Swarm Postmortem — the story of why we migrated from Docker Swarm
- 20 — Roadmap — known TODOs and scaling triggers
Appendices
Quick Facts
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Orchestrator | K3s v1.34.6+k3s1 (3 nodes, HA control plane) |
| Ingress | Traefik v3 (DaemonSet, hostNetwork) |
| Nodes | 3× Hetzner Cloud CX33 (4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 80 GB SSD) in nbg1 (Nuremberg) |
| DNS & Edge | Cloudflare (Free plan), SSL=Flexible, round-robin 3 node A records |
| Database | Neon Postgres, ep-floral-truth-amttbc5a.c-5.us-east-1.aws.neon.tech |
| Cache + Queue | Redis 7-alpine, in-cluster, 1 replica, PVC-backed, pinned to nbg1-2 |
| Object Storage | Backblaze B2, honeyDueProd bucket, us-east-005 region |
| Image Registry | Self-hosted Gitea v1.25.5 at gitea.treytartt.com |
| Transactional Email | Fastmail SMTP (smtp.fastmail.com:587) |
| Domains | api.myhoneydue.com, admin.myhoneydue.com, myhoneydue.com |
| Monthly Cost (current) | ~$30–40 (3× Hetzner + Neon Launch + B2 + Cloudflare Free + Gitea free) |
| kubeconfig | ~/.kube/honeydue-k3s.yaml on operator workstation |
| Repo | honeyDueAPI-go/deploy-k3s/ for manifests, deploy/ is the legacy Swarm config |
How to Read This Book
- "Why did we…?" answers are in the chapter covering that component. Every major design choice has an explicit rejection of 1–3 alternatives.
- Historical bugs are in Chapter 19. The rest of the book describes the current (fixed) state; 19 is the forensic record of what was broken and how we figured it out.
- Operator commands you'll run regularly are in Appendix B. Chapter 17 has longer procedures (cert rotation, DB migration, etc.).
- Citations throughout use footnote-style links to the canonical source (k3s docs, moby issues, Cloudflare docs, etc.). Appendix D collects them.
Conventions
- Kubernetes namespace for the app is
honeydue. - SSH aliases are
hetzner1,hetzner2,hetzner3in your~/.ssh/config. - Node hostnames in the cluster are
ubuntu-8gb-nbg1-{1,2,3}(Hetzner-assigned). - The mapping is non-obvious because the Hetzner hostname suffix order does not match SSH alias order:
| SSH alias | Public IP | Hostname in k3s |
|---|---|---|
| hetzner1 | 178.104.247.152 | ubuntu-8gb-nbg1-2 |
| hetzner2 | 178.105.32.198 | ubuntu-8gb-nbg1-1 |
| hetzner3 | 178.104.249.189 | ubuntu-8gb-nbg1-3 |
When a chapter refers to "hetzner1" it means the box at 178.104.247.152 / nbg1-2.