Good news, everyone! I have taken my years of breaking things in production and am going to distill it into guidance to help everyone have a brighter future. You know that feeling when you see somebody on YouTube or Reddit talking about this really cool thing they did in their homelab and wishing you could do something like that. Well, you can. Not only that, but it's easier (and cheaper!) than you think!
Stick with me as I walk through hardware, operating systems, scripting, and even GASP kubernetes! I know, I know. "But Mike, these are topics that are covered in great detail by other people!". This is very true, and I have read and watched a LOT of their stuff. And you're right; most of them are AWESOME! That's how I got to where I am today.
But here's the thing: A lot of that content is silo'd.
- "This is how you install kubernetes/docker/Talos"
- "This is how you install x in kubernetes/docker/Talos"
- "Set up NFS to back up to your NAS"
It's all great information, but a lot of it assumes that you have a brand new, squeaky clean setup that is EXACTLY like theirs.
- How can I migrate my existing reverse-proxy setup from Docker into Kubernetes?
- How should I install this really slick app in my homelab, which is definitely NOT a clean test bed?
- Why do my @#!& Unraid-backed NFS shares keep going down and saying "stale file handle"?
Let me know in the comments how many of you have something broken in your homelab right now. I know I do!
These questions right here (and many, many more!) are ones that I will be answering with detailed, step-by-step write-ups and troubleshooting guides. I'm not just going to throw concepts and hypotheticals at you, either. No, everything that we do here in my "Production-Grade Homelabbing" series is going to be a journey that I will take you on, a story of a time when I was bright-eyed and naive, not knowing what lay before me. You are going to see how I went from a shaky, error-prone Docker setup where doing maintenance on one of my servers meant having to communicate to my family and friends that services (or even the entire internet!) would be down, to a solid Kubernetes cluster with high-availability, load-balancing, and redundancy baked right in.
Oh, and did I mention that my exact setup is publicly available on GitHub? Yeah, I'm not just here to talk the talk. You can go right now to https://github.com/Taegost/homelab-k8s and see everything running in my homelab RIGHT NOW. You know what else? If you fork that repo and follow the steps in the bootstrap documentation, you can have the EXACT SAME SETUP running in less than 2 hours. Pretty neat, huh?
I'll let you in on another secret, and it's about secrets... You know how everyone says that you shouldn't ever commit secrets and credentials into source control? (Which you really shouldn't. EVER. It's a REALLY BAD HABIT). Well... If you take a peek at the repo, you'll see that... GASP Oh no! There are secrets in there, right out in the open! But here's the cool thing: They really aren't. You see, using a neat app called SealedSecrets, you can easily put your secrets in source control and rotate them on-demand, but they're still secure. I'll tell you all about it!
One last thing before I go: You're probably thinking "This dude probably spent a ton of money on his home lab". And, well, yeah... But not for the reasons you think. The hardware this is all running on? It cost me less than $1,000 in total, and that includes the swanky UPS protecting it. It's 3 mini PCs and a NAS I built from super cheap parts. Although to be fair: I have a LOT of storage in that NAS, and THAT was definitely not cheap, but it's also not a necessary part of the equation, and with things like Unraid, it can be expanded on-demand without being locked in to purchasing matching drives 5 at a time (stares hard at ZFS)
In conclusion: Stick around and learn with me! I promise, it won't be a boring journey, and you're going to see a lot of the mistakes I made along the way (If you look in that repo, you can see some of them in my detailed troubleshooting documents). Don't be afraid to break things. Sometimes that's the best way to learn. Don't wait, just try it.
Stay tuned and check out the overview of my Production-Grade homelab to kick off the series!