Overview¶

👋 Welcome to my home operations documentation.

My home-ops repo contains the configuration for my bare-metal servers, virtual machines, proxmox cluster, k8s cluster, dns, and more. Also check out ramblurr/nixcfg for my NixOS configuration for various hosts.

  Tools¶

My primary tools for managing my infra:

🔧 Hardware¶

Compute and Storage¶

Networking¶

More info on my 10GbE setup

☁️ Cloud Dependencies¶

While most of my infrastructure and workloads are selfhosted I do rely upon the cloud for certain key parts of my setup. This saves me from having to worry about two things. (1) Dealing with chicken/egg scenarios and (2) services I critically need whether my cluster is online or not.

The alternative solution to these two problems would be to host a Kubernetes cluster in the cloud and deploy applications like HCVault, Vaultwarden, ntfy, and Gatus. However, maintaining another cluster and monitoring another group of workloads is a lot more time and effort than I am willing to put in.

⛵ Kubernetes¶

There is a template over at onedr0p/flux-cluster-template if you wanted to try and follow along with some of the practices I use here. Though my setup is custom and doesn't follow the template that closely.

Installation¶

My cluster is Talos provisioned overtop my Proxmox cluster. This is a semi hyper-converged cluster, workloads and block storage are sharing the same available resources on my nodes while I have a separate NAS for (NFS) file storage.

🔸 Click here to see my Ansible playbooks and roles.

Core Components¶

• actions-runner-controller: self-hosted Github runners
• cilium: internal Kubernetes networking plugin
• cert-manager: creates SSL certificates for services in my cluster
• external-dns: automatically syncs DNS records from my cluster ingresses to a DNS provider
• external-secrets: managed Kubernetes secrets using 1Password Connect.
• ingress-nginx: ingress controller for Kubernetes using NGINX as a reverse proxy and load balancer
• rook: distributed block storage for persistent storage. I use a Ceph cluster external to the cluster, running on Proxmox.
• sops: managed secrets for Kubernetes, Ansible and Terraform which are commited to Git
• volsync and snapscheduler: backup and recovery of persistent volume claims

GitOps¶

Flux watches my k8s/k8s-prod folder (see Directories below) and makes the changes to my cluster based on the YAML manifests.

The way Flux works for me here is it will recursively search the k8s/k8s-prod/workloads folder until it finds the most top level kustomization.yaml per directory and then apply all the resources listed in it. That aforementioned kustomization.yaml will generally only have a namespace resource and one or many Flux kustomizations. Those Flux kustomizations will generally have a HelmRelease or other resources related to the application underneath it which will be applied.

Renovate watches my entire repository looking for dependency updates, when they are found a PR is automatically created. When some PRs are merged Flux applies the changes to my cluster.

Directories¶

This Git repository contains the following directories under kubernetes.

📁 k8s/k8s-prod    # Kubernetes cluster defined as code
├─📁 bootstrap     # Flux installation
├─📁 flux          # Main Flux configuration of repository
└─📁 workloads     # Apps deployed into my cluster grouped by namespace

🌐 DNS¶

Home DNS¶

I have two Raspberry PI 3s running CoreDNS that serve as the main DNS provider for my network. In my k8s cluster external-dns is deployed with the RFC2136 provider which syncs DNS records to bind9.

For downstream DNS I use NextDNS which provides adblocking.

Public DNS¶

Outside the external-dns instance mentioned above another instance is deployed in my cluster and configure to sync DNS records to Cloudflare. The only ingresses this external-dns instance looks at to gather DNS records to put in Cloudflare are ones that have an ingress class name of external and an ingress annotation of external-dns.alpha.kubernetes.io/target.

  Thanks¶

Thanks to all the people who donate their time to the Kubernetes @Home Discord community. A lot of inspiration for my cluster comes from the people that have shared their clusters using the k8s-at-home GitHub topic. Be sure to check out the Kubernetes @Home search for ideas on how to deploy applications or get ideas on what you can deploy.

And also a big thanks to the great community from the Self-Hosted Podcast (and Jupiter Broadcasting in general!). It's a friendly community of FOSS, Linux, Self-Hosting advocates.

🤔 Still interested?¶

Here's a few more things to check out:

• My NAS which I migrated from TrueNAS Core to NixOS
• My Router which runs VyOS. I know Opnsense is all the hype these days, but I really think VyOS can't be beat.
• My 10GbE setup.
• I have a lot of IoT projects around the house

🔏 License¶

Different parts of my home-ops repo have different licenses. Refer to the LICENSE file in the various subdirectories.