An AI Agent Lives in My Cluster: Read-Only RBAC, Network Policies, and Getting Red-Teamed by Friends

thomas@tnepeters.com (Thomas Peters) — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Problem

I run Hermes - a persistent, tool-using AI agent - inside my Kubernetes cluster. It helps me operate the homelab: check on failing pods, read ArgoCD app status, dig through CloudNativePG backups, tell me why a node is unhappy. To do any of that it needs kubectl, cluster credentials, and network reach.

Which means I deliberately deployed a curious, tool-wielding, LLM-driven process inside my cluster, gave it a service account, and then - because apparently I like living dangerously - gave my friends their own instances.

Ai on Thomas Peters

An AI Agent Lives in My Cluster: Read-Only RBAC, Network Policies, and Getting Red-Teamed by Friends

The Problem