State of the Server 2026 and Kubernetes Updates/Tips

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 03, 2026

• Jake Howard ☛ State of the Server 2026

  Over 2025, I've come to realise quite how much I rely on the services running on my home server. Sure, I could still get on with most aspects of life, but so much revolves around my services being there and working. Over time, I only intend to grow that dependence, so I want to make sure everything is at its best.

  Much like 2024, 2025 has been another long and tiring year for a number of reasons. As a result, there's not much which has changed dramatically. Instead, most of the changes this year have been about making my life easier, making tools more useful and generally making less work for myself.

  And so, continuing with tradition, let's take a walk through my infrastructure: [...]

• Path Aware High Availability (PAHA)

  During my works on Kubernetes on GNU/Linux on Z and the creation of https://github.com/azouhr/pgtwin, I came across the same issue that most admins have to solve in two-node clusters. How can I get quorum, and what node is to be the primary.

  While using additional techniques like providing a second corosync ring for HA, and even a third ring for an IPMI device, the elegance of having a three node quorum could not easily be implemented in my desired environment.

  When trying to solve the correct placement of the primary PostgreSQL database in the two-Node Cluster, it came to me, that there is an external dependency that could be used as arbitrator. It does not really help an application if a resource is available, but it cannot be reached.

• Kubernetes Blog ☛ Kubernetes v1.35: New level of efficiency with in-place Pod restart

  The release of Kubernetes 1.35 introduces a powerful new feature that provides a much-requested capability: the ability to trigger a full, in-place restart of the Pod. This feature, Restart All Containers (alpha in 1.35), allows for an efficient way to reset a Pod's state compared to resource-intensive approach of deleting and recreating the entire Pod. This feature is especially useful for AI/ML workloads allowing application developers to concentrate on their core training logic while offloading complex failure-handling and recovery mechanisms to sidecars and declarative Kubernetes configuration. With RestartAllContainers and other planned enhancements, Kubernetes continues to add building blocks for creating the most flexible, robust, and efficient platforms for AI/ML workloads.

  This new functionality is available by enabling the RestartAllContainersOnContainerExits feature gate. This alpha feature extends the Container Restart Rules feature, which graduated to beta in Kubernetes 1.35.