I Built a Production Platform… Just to Write a Blog

I just wanted to write a blog. That’s it. No scaling requirements. No users. No revenue. Just a place to write. So naturally, I built a 3-node Kubernetes cluster on bare metal, automated everything with Terraform and Ansible, added GitOps, monitoring, alerting, and exposed it to the internet using a zero-trust Cloudflare tunnel. Completely normal. 🤔 Why Over-Engineer Something So Simple? Because the goal wasn’t the blog. The goal was to learn how real platforms are built. Not tutorials. Not “hello world” deployments. But the actual systems that sit behind production environments. So I treated this like a real platform: Fully automated Reproducible Observable Secure by design ⚙️ The One Command That Does Everything Everything starts with: docker compose up That single command: Provisions infrastructure (Terraform → Proxmox) Configures the cluster (Ansible → Kubernetes) Deploys platform services (Ingress, monitoring, GitOps) Deploys applications (WordPress + MariaDB) Sets up public acce