Month: 2025-10. Focused on CNPG backup resilience and capacity within the lsst-it/k8s-cookbook project. Delivered enhancements to the CNPG-cluster backup workflow across multiple cluster configurations (manke, pillan, ruka, yagan) by extending activeDeadlineSeconds and increasing storage capacity for the yagan overlay. This work reduces backup timeouts and scales with data growth. No major bugs were reported this month; the changes are primarily reliability and capacity improvements.

September 2025: Delivered secure external access for the S3 Butler service in the k8s-cookbook repository by implementing an Ingress with TLS (Let's Encrypt) and correcting a hostname typo that affected domain resolution. Adjusted proxy settings to ensure reliable routing from external clients to the S3 Butler service via Kubernetes Ingress. This work improves security, availability, and operational reliability for external integrations and client access.

August 2025 monthly summary focusing on centralized access, security, observability, and reliability improvements for the lsst-it/k8s-cookbook. Key outcomes include centralizing cluster components, externalizing credentials, enabling monitoring, upgrading CNPG tooling, and hardening Grafana deployment to prevent data loss. Also completed fleet-wide cleanup by removing stale pukem configurations. These changes reduce operational risk, improve compliance, and accelerate maintenance across the fleet.

July 2025 monthly summary for lsst-it/k8s-cookbook focusing on delivering scalable infrastructure improvements, storage capacity, and networking readiness. The team implemented cluster-wide component upgrades, expanded data capacity, and introduced dedicated network resources to support growth and reliable deployments.

June 2025 monthly highlights: delivered strategic platform modernization, strengthened network and storage governance, and expanded deployment patterns across Kubernetes and Rancher ecosystems. Business value was realized through safer infrastructure upgrades, improved network routing, and clearer targeting of clusters for automation. Key features delivered and major changes: - Rancher to RKE2 migration across lsst-control with updated hieradata, removal of outdated RKE-specific settings, and alignment of node roles to rke2server; added cert-manager, ingress-nginx, and MetalLB for RKE2 deployments; Fleet configuration updated to point to the RKE2 Rancher path. Commit highlights: cluster/rancher migrate (2d2b9fa202de73bc11dd84c66e28e638352c0a00); cluster/rancher migrate (77bed4738a697d1331d90dbf966521d1725cfccf); rke2/rancher.cp migrate config (ea96cb496abd5b6b8b223cfbbcd9a751b070bbfe). - MetalLB deployment stabilization and IP fixes in k8s-cookbook: corrected IP pool configuration and ensured Helm upgrade sequence updates; addressed large index files and incorrect ingress IP assignment. Commit: template/metallb fix (339b1473eeb87888d224b0812346456cbfea0081). - Ingress IP alignment in Rancher overlay to match new network routing: updated ingress IP to reflect routing changes. Commit: fleet/rancher.ls change ip for ingress (ab50a8c6bf6c388346ba3a6f76d1e6e711a5d663). - LFA data pool storage quota introduced (3 PiB) on Elqui cluster to enforce storage governance. Commit: set 3PiB on lfa data pool on elqui (f87bcd2cee7a75bc4b6552412d52adc77aee38ca). - Fleet cluster targeting enhancement: refactored cluster targeting from clusterName to clusterSelector using matchExpressions for flexible identification by display name. Commit: fix CP clusterName to clusterSelector (71a6b20c9f8371df315fa9e0439dc921b6c364ce). - Htcondor worker init robustness: prevented symlink creation errors by creating links only if they do not already exist for comcam and auxtel data directories. Commit: fix initcontainer summit worker (694157cb8c1182988c529b26b5bda985a04391b6). - CNPGSphere image bump to 16.8 on Pillan cluster to use the latest stable image. Commit: bump cnpgsphere 16.8 on pillan (17a835c96cb20bf3c146b0920def4886573ea28d). - Documentation and onboarding: Vera Rubin Observatory added to ADOPTERS.md with ownership and use case details. Commit: docs: add Vera Rubin Observatory to ADOPTERS.md (#7837) (149b32a4d42cae785c3c81b67d4d7fbbcd752ae9).

May 2025 monthly summary emphasizing multi-cluster modernization, reliability, and efficiency across Kubernetes platforms and control plane repositories. Delivered flexible fleet deployment with label-based targeting, cleaned up obsolete cluster configurations, modernized Rancher/RKE2 deployments, and enhanced observability with low-resource Prometheus. Standardized rebuild processes, improved storage provisioning with Ceph, and performed essential dependency upgrades for stability and security. Impact highlights include reduced deployment drift, faster multi-cluster rollouts, lower resource consumption, and stricter lifecycle management. The work demonstrates strong capabilities in Kubernetes operations, infrastructure as code, and cross-repo collaboration, delivering tangible business value through safer, scalable, and cost-efficient platforms.

April 2025 monthly summary focusing on key achievements, business value, and technical excellence across two repositories (lsst-control and k8s-cookbook). The month delivered core platform reliability improvements, stack modernization, automated certificate management, scalable database tuning, and enhanced observability—enabling faster delivery, better security, and improved multi-environment operations.

March 2025 monthly summary for lsst-it repositories. Delivered significant enhancements across observability, capacity planning, data protection, and network infrastructure. Focused on reducing maintenance burden, improving reliability, and enabling scalable operations while keeping security and governance in mind.

February 2025 monthly summary: Delivered foundational platform improvements across lsst-control and k8s-cookbook that strengthen reliability, security, and scalability for production workloads and multi-cluster data services. Highlights include migration to RKE2 with new cluster roles for konkong and manke clusters, enabling RBAC-aligned governance and streamlined operations; provisioning of a new scratch storage NFS mount on tel-hw1 to accelerate dev/test cycles with boot-persistent storage; and deployment of the luan cluster for Keycloak-PG in k8s-cookbook, enabling scalable multi-cluster operation with backup services, external secrets for credentials, and a PostgreSQL load balancer. Updated testing specifications and fleet overlays reflect the new configurations, improving deployment confidence and repeatability.

Monthly summary for 2025-01 focused on delivering production-grade infrastructure, Kubernetes/Rook Ceph upgrades, and reliability enhancements across two repositories. Key contributions strengthened hardware compatibility, security posture, and scalable cluster operations while expanding storage and backup capabilities.

In December 2024, delivered targeted changes across two repositories to boost performance, reliability, and correct dependency delivery. The work focused on Kubernetes resource tuning for a critical service and Nexus repository configuration hygiene, with traceable commits enabling auditability and reproducibility. These efforts reduce runtime throttling risks and ensure accurate package delivery for the hexrot role.

Month 2024-11 delivered a set of network, storage, and data-management enhancements across lsst-control and k8s-cookbook, focusing on security, reliability, and governance. Key business outcomes include improved Kubernetes networking reliability, scalable storage management, and clearer data lifecycle policies for object storage.