I have rss feeds for my main service updates so I know what new features I have, the services mostly run in podman containers and update automatically each Monday. I also have daily backups (timed to run just before the update on monday) in case anything does break.

If it breaks I fix it depending on how much I want/need it, mostly it’s a matter of half an hour to fix it and with my current NixOS/Podman system I haven’t yet needed to fix anything this year so it breaks infrequently.

Also why are you using Kubernetes on a single host if you want minimal maintenance? XD

My recommendation is to switch to just managing containers, you should just be able to export the volumes out of kubernetes and import them as normal volumes, as long as they’re mounted in the right place you keep your data and if it doesn’t work just try again. Not like you need to destroy the current system to slowly replace it.

Edit: I also recommend to update and reboot frequently, this stops updates and unstable configurations from piling up.