A key part of operating any safe and reliable system is ensuring that there is a way to recover deleted or lost data in a prompt and consistent way. One key part of that is to maintain automatic backups that are recoverable and verifiable. This is a quick and easy way to accomplish that goal, by using existing pieces of infrastructure that are common in production networks. There are countless ways to perform a backup, this is simply one of the “easiest” given these ingredients are available.

In an absolutely perfect world, we’d never have to restart our server software ever, because it would be flawless. There would be no bugs, memory leaks, state locks, and we’d all get along with each other! Unfortunately, we live in a much crappier world where our software is imperfect, and we don’t have enough time or resources to fix it properly. In the olden days, we’d just put a one-liner in root’s crontab, and be done with it:

I have wanted to run Kubernetes at home for some time, but the main obstacle has been a reliable solution for providing load balancing for ingress or services, and the lack of a reasonable way to manage NAT transparently. While publicly routable IPv4 addresses are seemingly limitless* in the cloud, typically we only get one at home. Similarly, there isn’t a straightforward way to build cloud-ey load balancers at home. While Google and Amazon can conjure up magic TCP load balancers on their complex overlay network platform, we don’t really have that luxury outside of the cloud.