Kubernetes

Your pod is Running, your Service exists, the curl still hangs. Most Kubernetes traffic diagrams stop at a Load Balancer cloud. On bare metal that cloud is a Cisco Nexus EVPN fabric. Here is one HTTPS request traced all the way to the pod, with the command that proves every hop.

One HTTPS request followed from an external client to a pod, with the show commands and packet captures from every device it touches: BGP unnumbered underlay, type-2, type-3 and type-5 EVPN routes, symmetric routing proven on the wire, a Palo Alto A/A pair and Cilium.

The finale: one request traced live through all eight hops the series built, the five traps ranked by hours lost, and what I would do differently next time. Plus the honest single point of failure the design still carries.

Longhorn on the workers (the storage leaves finally earn their name), 60Gi of language models surviving node death, a dozen apps behind one login, and the five-object checklist that publishes anything.

One Gateway claims the BGP-advertised VIP, a cert-manager chain makes every app green-padlock HTTPS, sixteen HTTPRoutes share one door, and split-view DNS gives the same names two honest answers.

One helm install, three jobs: the pod network, kube-proxy's whole duty in eBPF, and BGP from every node to its leaf pair's anycast gateway. Plus the consent chain that keeps VIP announcements deliberate, and the anycast peering quirk worth knowing.

kubeadm the deliberate way: a load-balanced control-plane endpoint before anything else, stacked etcd split across leaf pairs, no kube-proxy by design, and the NotReady checkpoint that makes Part 8 make sense.

One golden image, one netplan file per node: LACP bonds into the vPC pairs, out-of-band management, the virtio link-speed trap that silently breaks 802.3ad, and the switch side of every bond.

How my bare-metal k8s cluster gets cloud-style LoadBalancer IPs: Cilium allocates a VIP, every node advertises it over eBGP to the NX-OS leaves, and the fabric ECMPs traffic into the cluster. Full walk from IPAM pool to leaf routing table.