Homelab

This repo contains all the source and configs required to run my homelab Kubernetes cluster.

The idea is to showcase my approach to structuring and maintaining a secure Kubernetes cluster.

It is a sandbox for me to learn new cloud-native tools and technologies while being able to put them to practice.

GitOps is achieved through FluxCD.

I also use this cluster to maintain devpods for my other labs dedicated to application and systems tech, such as dotnet and Open Telemetry.

Infancy

I am still in the early stages of bootstrapping architectural components such as a container registry, persistent storage, Ingress, CNI and secrets.

Infrastructure

All nodes are running ubuntu server 24.04 LTS.

I used k3s-ansible to provision the cluster.

All default options were used as I will likely be using external-dns and Cilium later on.

I might bring it in as a submodule later if I end up re-installing often.

Hardware

Currently my homelab runs in a 4-node setup: 1 x control-plane 3 x workers

Roadmap

Here is a list of things I want to achieve:

Checklist

• [] Complete devpod integration
• Self-hosted storage
• Deploy self-hosted apps
• Azure secrets
• Expose apps to internet
• [] Container registry
• CNI
• [] Observability

Milestones

These milestones describe the items in the checklist.

Complete Devpod Integration

I want to be able to create devpods for my lab and apps.

I will need to implement resource constraints so they do not impact the rest of the cluster.

UPDATE

There a two main bottlenecks for getting this online:

1. Synology LUN limit of the DS118. I need to upgrade, probably to a DS224+.
2. Devpod takes a very long time to pull the images because of ISP bandwidth and registry rate limiting. Solved by implementing my own pull-through cache.

Self-Hosted Storage

Obtain a Synology NAS so my homelab can use persistent storage.

COMPLETED

Deploy Self-Hosted Apps

Such as commafeed, linkding and wallabag.

COMPLETED

Azure Secrets

I want to use external-secrets to connect to an Azure Key Vault.

This will allow me to securely and privately store my app and service credentials.

COMPLETED

Expose Apps to Internet

Ensure use of industry standard best practices to secure my homelab cluster.

This will also allow me to access my self-hosted apps over the internet.

COMPLETED

Container Registry

Self-hosting a container registry will allow me to create container images for my dotnet apps.

It would also allow me to set up some pull-through caches to reduce devpod creation times.

CNI

I want to use Cilium for my CNI.

Research indicates it is a robust widely-used tool.

COMPLETED

Observability

Through a LGTM/P + otel-collector stack.

I enjoyed wiring Open Telemetry into dotnet apps, and I would like to continue exploring the tech.

They key challenge here is ensuring the collector and Prometheus play well together.

Prometheus will need the remote-receiver (or equivelant flag) enabling for collectors to push metrics to it.

An amount of relabelling will need to be done for the dashboards to work.