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Kaito Snezhko
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Kubernetes: from a single pod to Nextcloud

What I built step by step on a Minikube cluster — deployments, services, ingress routing, init containers, persistent volumes and a multi-container Nextcloud stack.

updated 7 Jul 2026 · level intermediate · 1 min read

#kubernetes#minikube#ingress#storage

From Cloud Technologies 2 (FH JOANNEUM, summer 2026). I ran everything on a Minikube cluster with its own profile (tutorial) on a university server and showed every milestone live.

1. Pods, deployments and services

  • A Deployment keeps N replicas of a pod alive and handles rolling updates; a pod on its own just dies.
  • ClusterIP services are for traffic inside the cluster, NodePort opens a port on the node for outside access.
  • Database credentials go into a Secret, the rest of the config into a ConfigMap. Both are injected as environment variables.
bash
kubectl get all -o wide
kubectl scale deploy/hello --replicas=3
kubectl rollout status deploy/hello

2. Ingress: one host, several services

An NGINX ingress routes by path: hello.info/ goes to one service, hello.info/world to another.

bash
kubectl describe ingress hello-ingress
curl --resolve "hello.info:80:$(minikube ip)" -i http://hello.info/world

3. Init containers and shared volumes

An init container runs before the main container. Mine downloaded the app from GitLab with curl, using a token from a Secret and a URL from a ConfigMap. It wrote the app into an emptyDir volume that the main container then served.

4. Persistent storage

A PersistentVolume (NFS) plus a PersistentVolumeClaim keep data across pod restarts. To prove it, I restarted the pod and checked the log file was still there:

bash
kubectl rollout restart deploy/python-httpd
kubectl exec deploy/python-httpd -- df /mnt

5. Putting it together: Nextcloud

Nextcloud, MariaDB and Redis, each with its own deployment and service. Nextcloud finds the database and the cache by service name (cluster DNS), so no IPs are hard-coded.

Takeaways

  • Debug with kubectl describe and kubectl logs first. Most problems are typos in labels or selectors.
  • Never put secrets in the YAML you commit; create them with kubectl create secret.