GitOps with Flux on my k3s cluster

I already knew how to put things on a Kubernetes cluster. Helm packages the YAML. kubectl apply makes it exist. cert-manager mints the certificates. What I did not have was a boring answer to “what happens next week, when I have forgotten which laptop I ran that from?” GitOps is that answer, at least for platform on my homelab. In practice, GitOps means keeping the desired cluster state in git and having an in-cluster controller continuously reconcile the live cluster back to that state. simon-cluster is the name I gave the k3s cluster I run at home — a small Kubernetes estate for shared ingress, certificates, monitoring, and the GitHub Actions runners this blog builds on. Flux CD on that cluster watches a private platform repo and keeps it in line with main. The useful part is not “I put YAML in git.” It is the split. Flux owns MetalLB, Traefik, cert-manager, GitHub runners, the in-cluster registry, Cloudflare Tunnel, and monitoring. Application Helm releases in develop / main / test…