Create a k8s operator

[ccrawford4]

some fun ideas from ChatGPT:

1. “Presence Operator” — Smart Home / Human-Aware Cluster

Your cluster reacts to whether people are home.

What it does

The operator watches:

• phone presence
• WiFi devices
• Bluetooth beacons
• calendar events
• time of day

Then automatically:

• scales services up/down
• enables/disables public ingress
• powers GPU workloads
• changes DNS exposure
• pauses noisy jobs at night

Examples

• Nobody home → shut down media stack + AI models

• You arrive home → automatically warm up:

  • [Jellyfin](https://jellyfin.org/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
  • [Home Assistant](https://www.home-assistant.io/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
  • local LLMs

• Vacation mode → disable all public tunnels except VPN

Interesting CRD

apiVersion: home.calum.sh/v1
kind: PresencePolicy
metadata:
  name: movie-night
spec:
  when:
    peopleHome: ["calum"]
    timeAfter: "18:00"
  actions:
    scale:
      deployment: jellyfin
      replicas: 2

Why it’s cool

You’re basically building a “cluster nervous system.”

---

2. “EdgeSleep Operator” — Power-Aware Raspberry Pi Autoscaler

A Kubernetes operator that physically powers Pis on/off.

What it does

Uses:

• smart plugs
• Wake-on-LAN
• PoE hats
• IPMI-like APIs
• Tailscale/SSH

To dynamically:

• wake dormant Pi workers
• drain nodes before shutdown
• consolidate workloads overnight

Features

• Energy dashboard
• Temperature-aware scheduling
• Solar/battery-aware scaling
• Carbon-aware scheduling

Fun feature

If the cluster load spikes:

1. operator powers on another Pi
2. node joins cluster automatically
3. workloads rebalance

Like cloud autoscaling… but literally in your living room.

---

3. “Tunnel Operator” — Auto-Public Exposure via Cloudflare

This fits your current stack perfectly.

What it does

You create an Ingress-like CRD:

apiVersion: tunnel.calum.sh/v1
kind: PublicService
metadata:
  name: blog
spec:
  service: blog-service
  hostname: blog.example.com
  auth:
    google: true
  rateLimit:
    requestsPerMinute: 100

Operator automatically:

• provisions Cloudflare tunnel routes
• creates DNS records
• configures Traefik middleware
• enables OAuth
• provisions mTLS certs
• generates preview URLs

Bonus ideas

• Ephemeral PR environments
• One-click share links
• Geo-restricted services
• Auto-expiring public URLs

Why it’s fun

Feels like building your own tiny Heroku/Render/Vercel platform.

---

4. “LAN Party Operator” — Multiplayer Game Cluster

Your cluster becomes a retro LAN-party appliance.

What it does

Creates dedicated game servers dynamically:

• Minecraft
• Counter-Strike
• Valheim
• Factorio

Features

• Auto DNS + Cloudflare exposure
• Temporary servers
• Discord/webhook integration
• Backup worlds automatically
• Suspend inactive servers

Cool twist

The operator could:

• detect active players
• scale CPU-heavy nodes
• migrate servers off overheating Pis

CRD Example

apiVersion: gaming.calum.sh/v1
kind: GameServer
metadata:
  name: saturday-minecraft
spec:
  game: minecraft
  maxPlayers: 12
  autoSleepAfter: 30m

---

5. “Chaos Neighbor Operator” — Self-Healing Homelab Gremlin

A chaos engineering operator designed specifically for homelabs.

What it does

Intentionally causes failures:

• kills pods
• disables tunnels
• corrupts DNS
• simulates SD card failure
• rate limits network
• reboots Pis

Why?

To test whether your cluster actually self-heals.

Fun mechanics

Gamify resilience:

• “Cluster survived 14 days without intervention”
• resilience score
• failure replay timeline

Especially fun with:

• Longhorn/Ceph
• Traefik failover
• Cloudflare tunnels
• distributed Redis/Postgres

Example CRD

apiVersion: chaos.calum.sh/v1
kind: GremlinEvent
metadata:
  name: evil-tuesday
spec:
  target:
    nodeSelector:
      type: raspberry-pi
  actions:
    - reboot
    - packetLoss: 40%

---

Bonus Idea: “Physical Dashboard Operator”

A tiny operator that controls:

• e-ink displays
• LED matrices
• RGB strips
• OLED screens attached to Pis

Shows:

• cluster health
• tunnel status
• current ingress traffic
• node temperatures
• GitOps sync state

Imagine:

• cluster healthy = green ambient LEDs
• ArgoCD drift = flashing yellow
• node dead = red strip across the room

Could integrate with:

• [Argo CD](https://argo-cd.readthedocs.io/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
• [Prometheus](https://prometheus.io/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
• [Grafana](https://grafana.com/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)