🏠 Homelab

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. — Xunzi

My homelab is a playground for learning and experimentation.

I run a hybrid setup on top of Proxmox: some services live on Kubernetes, while others run as VMs or LXC containers, depending on what makes the most sense (simplicity, reliability, resource usage, or hardware access).

This setup pushes me to think critically about system design, backup strategies, security, scalability, and the overall ease of deployment and maintenance.

flowchart TB
  CF[Cloudflare Tunnel]

  subgraph Proxmox[Proxmox]
    direction TB

    subgraph VM[VM]
      direction TB
      Postgres[Postgres]
      HomeAssistant[HomeAssistant]
      Minikube[Minikube]
      HomeAssistant ~~~ Postgres ~~~ Minikube
    end

    subgraph LXC[LXC]
      direction TB
      FreshRSS[FreshRSS]
      UptimeKuma[Uptime Kuma]
      Pulse[Pulse]
      Ollama[Ollama]
      Sure[Sure]
      FreshRSS ~~~ Sure ~~~ UptimeKuma ~~~ Pulse ~~~ Ollama
    end

    subgraph K8S[Cluster k8s]
      direction TB
      CP[k8s-controlplane]
      W1[k8s-worker-1]
      W2[k8s-worker-2]
      CP --> W1
      CP --> W2
    end
  end

  %% External exposure (Cloudflare)
  CF -.-> FreshRSS
  CF -.-> UptimeKuma
  CF -.-> Sure
  CF -.-> HomeAssistant

  %% Non-network "layout hints"
  CF ~~~ Postgres
  Minikube ~~~ CP
  Sure ~~~ CP

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⚙️ Components and tools

Platform

• Virtualization: Proxmox
• Workloads: Kubernetes, VMs, LXC containers

Services

• Home Assistant — home automation platform
• Sure — personal finance & budgeting
• FreshRSS — RSS aggregator for reading and filtering feeds
• Uptime Kuma — uptime monitoring and alerting
• Pulse — resource monitoring (CPU, RAM, disk/storage) for my homelab
• Ollama — local LLM runtime for experiments
• Postgres — sandbox database (dev/test)
• Minikube — local Kubernetes sandbox for quick testing

Kubernetes (when it fits)

• Load Balancer (L2 ARP): MetalLB
• Networking: Cilium
• Ingress controller (L7 HTTP): Traefik
• GitOps: FluxCD (GitHub)