Summer vacation work summary: 18 July – 19 August 2026

Status: Reference — a retrospective, not a plan

Scope: everything merged to main between 2026-07-18 and 2026-08-19. Volume: 145 commits, 58 pull requests, 4 new services, 30 plans and investigations written.

This is a record of what happened and why, kept because several of the decisions below are load-bearing and the reasoning is worth more than the diff.

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1. Four services packaged

Service	Date	Notes
MinIO	28 Jul	Object storage; reclassified to STORAGE
Temporal	28 Jul	Workflow engine
Uptime Kuma	7 Aug	The external watchdog, on assist
Alloy	11 Aug	Log collection into Loki

Uptime Kuma took the longest path: investigated → deployed → packaged as a first-class service → first-run wizard removed → uis undeploy --purge honoured → history retention seeded → AutoKuma folded in as part of the service. See PLAN-service-uptime-kuma-004-uis-service.

2. Observability went from installed to working

INVESTIGATE-system-observability measured the starting point: 11 components, ~4 GB of RAM, zero alert rules, zero log shippers, and a Loki holding only its own canary traffic. Monitoring was installed; nothing was monitored.

By 11 August:

• 11 baseline alert rules delivering to Telegram
• Alloy shipping container logs into Loki
• The hypervisor and the external database scraped, so capacity is visible outside the cluster
• External scrape targets declared in .uis.extend/, not hardcoded
• A PostgreSQL dashboard shipped with the service — every metric counted in Prometheus before a panel was written, so no panel renders "No data"

3. Three defects where something existed but was not wired

A recurring shape, worth naming because it appeared four times in a month: an allowlist that new things never join, reporting success while missing the case.

A healthy stack could not deploy Grafana (OBS-F6). Two plausible theories were wrong before the cause turned up: kubectl run --rm -i returns rc=0 with empty stdout when the container outlives the attach. Every until: in that playbook asserted on stdout, so a successful HTTP call read as a failure — and it is load-dependent, which is why a different check failed on each deploy. See PLAN-service-grafana-deploy-gate-fix.

Verify playbooks that nothing could run. Registering one is a three-place change; the guide named two. 031-test-alloy.yml was reachable by no command at all while the Alloy docs page told users to run it; uptime-kuma's was invisible to test-all. All nine services audited afterwards. See PLAN-cli-verify-registration-fix.

Alloy absent from its own website. Docs page, sidebar entry and stack membership were all added, but services.json and stacks.json are generated and were never regenerated — so the site had no Alloy entry. See PLAN-service-alloy-verify-and-metadata-fix.

4. The external-service convention

The largest structural change. PostgreSQL and MinIO run outside the cluster in production and inside it on a laptop, behind one identical interface.

The convention turned out to already exist, hand-written on one machine, and to be better than anything that would have been designed: a proxy carrying the real service's name and labels, so PGHOST=postgresql.default resolves identically in both topologies and no consumer changes at all.

• Migration was invisible: changed=0, the pod never restarted
• Rebuild-from-nothing takes 14 seconds from a four-line declaration
• MinIO then proved it generalises — twice the ports, twice the Services, different labels — which settled that it is one template per service sharing a documented shape, not one generic template
• The reference installation now has zero hand-written proxies

See PLAN-system-external-services-001-proxy-convention.

5. Principle 0 written down

"Every service must be deployable on a developer's laptop" is the platform's central promise and was stated nowhere. Rancher Desktop appeared only as an incidental default in playbook examples.

That absence is why Alloy was hand-installed, and why OpenBao, the registry mirrors and the backup chain are still outside the platform. Nobody broke a rule — there was not one. It is now Principle 0 in kubernetes-deployment.md and a hard requirement at the top of adding-a-service.md.

6. Housekeeping that had accumulated

• Vulnerabilities 99 → 2. 26 Dependabot PRs, then npm overrides for two transitive roots Dependabot cannot reach. The remaining two are image-size with no published patch — a floor, not a backlog item.
• 46 broken documentation links → 0, and the check that finds them made runnable. There is no Node on the workstation or in the provision-host container, so npm run build had been skipped every time it was asked for; it runs fine in a node:20 container and that command is now in the guide.
• 1PRIORITY re-ranked after three months of drift — it claimed 25 investigations when there were 35, and the two driving all current work were missing entirely.

7. Open at the end of this period

Three investigations, all Tier 1, none built:

service-openbao	The proxy convention does not fit it — TLS SANs cover no in-cluster name, kubernetes auth runs into the cluster, and ESO is the only consumer
The vault question	OpenBao backs one secret while urbalurba-secrets carries 54. The need is not demonstrated at current scale
secrets-dev-to-production	envsubst renders an unset key as an empty string, silently; validation is a hardcoded allowlist; a LocalDev placeholder can reach production unwarned

Observability itself is roughly half done — dashboards are still applied by hand and probes are 0/27, both blocked on one artifact-convention decision.

8. After the main body of work

Two changes landed on 19 August that came from elsewhere:

• Redis dropped its persistence PVC — it is a cache
• Monitors gained a severity, routed to two ntfy priorities on the same topic, so the phone's Do Not Disturb decides what breaks through: "the server declares severity, the phone decides disturbance."

The second is the better fix to a problem that had been treated instance by instance — three monitors were paging every 30 minutes through the night because DHCP had moved the containers they watch, and separately a leftover debug pod kept PodNotReady firing for five days. Correcting addresses fixes today; severity routing fixes the class.