Welcome to My Homelab

I like building platforms. I started work as an embedded software engineer out of college, working on large networked systems. I spent a few years creating an embedded Linux distribution for medical devices (using Yocto) and most recently I worked on building cloud infrastructure and CI/CD systems using kubernetes.

I have worked with many different large, distributed systems. I like thinking about how systems can continue to operate when some parts experience failures. I worked on fire alarm panels for a number of years which required a lot of thought about how to make things fail gracefully (while buildings are on fire).

I am building a kubernetes home lab (again) so I have a place to test things out and do research in different areas. It runs on a combination of VMs and baremetal systems (amd64 & arm64). Right now there are 12 nodes, 9 physical hosts and 72 CPU cores.

Areas of Interest

• Self-healing systems
• Automated vulnerability detection & management
• Declarative systems
• Immutable infrastructure
• Infrastructure as code
• Container orchestration
• Observability

Software

• Kubernetes for orchestration
• Talos Linux as the primary OS for Kubernetes
• Ceph (external) used for storage
• Flux for continuous delivery/GitOps
• QEMU/KVM used for running Talos VMs

Hardware

I have set this cluster up so that some of the nodes come and go as desktop systems are turned on and off. When my daughter plays RDR2 on the gaming pc, the talos03 VM (a master node) and the talos08 VM (a worker node) are active. Likewise, my NixOS desktop runs a few worker VMs. When these systems are turned off, only the lower-power Intel N100 and Raspberry Pi4 systems remain active.

Host	Arch	CPU	Cores	RAM	K8s Masters	K8s Workers	Non-K8s	Notes
nuc1	amd64	Intel N100	4	16 GB	talos01		ceph
nuc2	amd64	Intel N100	4	16 GB	talos02		ceph
nuc3	amd64	Intel N100	4	16 GB		talos04 & 05	ceph
nixos	amd64	Ryzen 7	16	32 GB		talos06 & 07		volatile
gamer	amd64	Intel i7	28	64 GB	talos03	talos08		volatile
rpi4 #1	arm64	Cortex-A72	4	4 GB		talos09
rpi4 #2	arm64	Cortex-A72	4	4 GB		talos10
rpi4 #3	arm64	Cortex-A72	4	8 GB		talos11
rpi4 #4	arm64	Cortex-A72	4	4 GB		talos12

Nodes

Node	Job	CPUs	RAM	VM?	Notes
talos01	master	4	8GB	VM
talos02	master	4	8GB	VM
talos03	master	12	8GB	VM	volatile
talos04	worker	4	6GB	VM
talos05	worker	4	6GB	VM
talos06	worker	8	6GB	VM	volatile
talos07	worker	8	6GB	VM	volatile
talos08	worker	12	8GB	VM	volatile
talos09	worker	4	4GB	baremetal
talos10	worker	4	4GB	baremetal
talos11	worker	4	8GB	baremetal
talos12	worker	4	4GB	baremetal

Future

There are a lot of interesting projects that I would like to explore. I am going to try to use these in some way within my homelab:

• vcluster - Create fully functional virtual Kubernetes clusters
• kcp - Kubernetes-like control planes for form-factors and use-cases beyond Kubernetes and container workloads
• KubeVirt - A virtual machine management add-on for Kubernetes
• k8sgpt - A tool for scanning your Kubernetes clusters, diagnosing, and triaging issues in simple English
• Tinkerbell - A flexible bare metal provisioning engine
• NixOS - Declarative builds and deployments
• Proxmox on NixOS - The Proxmox Hypervisor, on NixOS
• KubeEdge - Kubernetes Native Edge Computing Framework
• Kairos - The immutable Linux meta-distribution for edge Kubernetes

Thanks

A big thanks to onedr0p for his template to bootstrap the cluster. I have been watching his work for years now and it is amazing what he has done for the kubernetes/homelab community. I have tinkered with a few iterations of his template over the years and I have learned a lot from doing so, and from looking at other repos based on his work.