Building a Homelab¶

Since 2024 I had this idea of running a homelab at home. A real Kubernetes cluster where I could test anything, break things, rebuild, and keep it running 24/7. I watched a lot of YouTube videos about it, read blog posts, and kept thinking "one day."

In the meantime I used kind, k3d, and minikube for everything. They're great for learning, but they're ephemeral. Every time I closed the laptop, the cluster was gone. No persistence, no real GitOps, no long-running workloads. I wanted something permanent.

In early 2026 I finally went for it. DDR5 memory prices were absurd because of AI demand, but I decided to just deal with it and buy the hardware anyway.

Hardware¶

I went with a single mini PC instead of multiple nodes. More memory in one machine, and if I need more disk later, I just add it.

• Ryzen 9
• 96GB DDR5 5600MHz
• 1TB NVMe

Expensive, especially the memory. But I wanted room to run a real stack without constantly hitting limits.

On top of it I installed Proxmox, so the Kubernetes nodes run as virtual machines. This gives me snapshots, easy rebuilds, and the flexibility to spin up other VMs or LXC containers for things outside the cluster (like AdGuard for DNS).

Cluster¶

4 nodes. 1 control plane, 3 workers. The workers aren't identical. I split them into small, medium, and large tiers with different CPU, memory, and disk. Reflects real life and makes scheduling decisions more interesting.

Everything provisioned with Terraform, running on Talos Linux.

What's next¶

From here, the plan is to keep adding components to the cluster and writing about each one as I go. GitOps, observability, storage, networking, TLS. Each piece gets its own post with the details of how it's configured and what I learned setting it up.