Introduction

My home lab setup has changed a lot since my last post in 2018. Now it’s 2021 and hype dictionary has change significantly.

I’ve spent the last year or so adopting the cloud-first mindset and my infrastructure has evolved. This will be a 2 part series where I’ll showcase my home lab services and some of the interesting challenges I faced while building them.

In this post I’ll list all the applications I am currently running and what’s their use case and in the second part I will go into detail of how I built them and some of the more interesting challenges I faced during this endeavour.

Service Showcase

(sorted alphabetically)

Bind9 DNS Server

Dnscrypt

Drone CI/CD

Build Status
Infra Build Status
Website Build Status

F1 Stream

Hackmd

KMS Licensing Server

Kubernetes Dashboard

Mail Server

metallb Network Load Balancer

Monitoring Services

Prometheus

Grafana

Alertmanager

Example email alert:

Pihole

Privatebin

Status Page

Webhook Handler

Website

Wireguard VPN

High Level Overview

All of these services are deployed inside a Kubernetes cluster with 1 master and 5 worker nodes. Each node is a VMWare virtual machine all of which run on a single ESXi host.

More technical details in part 2.