This. Helm charts and renovate. The (frequently) included release notes help ease upgrades. If the charts / apps you deploy publish good release notes, you will get them in the renovate, easing your mind when upgrading.

It’s not perfect. Some don’t publish release notes, or the release notes only include the chart changes and not app changes. But if provided, there’s a link to the source to double check.

Also having something like ArgoCD that allows you to preview chart changes before syncing is very useful.

Same, you can enable local only API. Works great and they have public docs for it’s API. I also have an exporter with grafana graphs.

I also have a ton of domains that I wanted to be able to receive email on. In my case, I was the only recipient so I just needed a provider that let me setup aliases.

Fastmail is pretty affordable. All plans except the business basic plan allow you to setup 100 custom domains which you can the forward to your mailbox.

Their mail app is pretty solid. I particularly like that it lets you receive notifications for email that’s been moved to another folder. Which I’ve had troubles with on other emails apps. I also really like that I can use a custom domain for random masked emails.