The oldest working notes on this site. They start in early 2018 with a cluster built by hand on generic VMs and run through ingress, TLS, basic auth, CORS, RBAC for developers and QA, upstream DNS, and the services I put on top of it: Elasticsearch, Kibana, Kafka, a private Ethereum chain, Kubeless, and kubefwd.

Some of it has aged badly. ingress-nginx is retired, the Docker shim was removed from the kubelet, and Elasticsearch changed its license in 2021. Where a note is out of date I add a 2026 Update section rather than rewriting it, because the distance between what worked then and what works now is the useful part.

For a current build of the same ground, from bare VMs up through storage, ingress, databases, and observability, see Advanced Platform Development.