Although Kubernetes is principally designed for a production environment a hacker’s homelab has different requirements. Scalability and high availability, while important and nice goals, ultimately take a back seat in a home environment to more practical concerns such as financial resources and maintenance complexity.

Kubernetes is many things, but one of the main things it is, especially to newcomers, is confusing. There have been many attempts to explain what exactly Kubernetes is ranging from “It’s docker, essentially” to “an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications”, but nothing I’ve read has really seemed to capture the essence of what Kubernetes really does, or why it exists, or really what the whole point of this thing is, anyway.

The layering of orthogonal concepts within SQLAlchemy lends itself to deep introspection. These capabilities can be used for a variety of purposes including debugging and concise expression of programmatic intent. The detailed introspection API added in version 0.8 can be very useful in several scenarios. Previously, while these introspection capabilities were available, they were mostly undocumented and without official support. We’ll cover some deeper parts of this API through the investigation of an application bug and the addition of a common feature. First, though, it might be best to glance at the surface.

For some time now Axial has been outgrowing Django. We’ve been spreading out code into multiple services, each responsible for a core aspect of our data and member facing products. To ensure we don’t make the single worst strategic mistake we’ve generally decided to not rewrite large portions of code all at once. This has worked pretty well even though it sometimes feels a lot like we’re changing tires on a moving car: