A single-node Kubernetes cluster running seven Helm-managed services concurrently — Gitea, Mattermost, PostgreSQL, kube-prometheus-stack, Jenkins, Temporal, and NATS — looks tractable on paper. The charts are all upstream-maintained. The hardware is modest but adequate. The operational reality is that zero of the seven ran cleanly on out-of-the-box values. Every chart needed at least one customization to coexist with the others, and several needed substantial rewrites of the helm-values surface. This survey catalogs what those customizations are, why each was necessary, and what the common failure modes look like across the fleet.

A single-node minikube cluster on Docker Desktop runs the entire control plane, kubelet, every PVC, every Secret, and the container image cache inside one VM whose disk is one file: ~/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker/Data/vms/0/data/Docker.raw on macOS. When that file is lost or corrupted, every piece of cluster state goes with it in a single event. There is no “node failure vs storage failure” distinction to design around. Every backup strategy that assumes those are separable does not apply.