Introduction

Warning

These docs contain information that relates to my setup. They may or may not work for you.



My Home Operations Repository :octocat:

... managed with Flux, Renovate, and GitHub Actions 🤖

Discord   Talos   Kubernetes   Renovate

Home-Internet   Status-Page   Alertmanager

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📖 Overview

This is a mono repository for my home infrastructure and Kubernetes cluster. I try to adhere to Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and GitOps practices using tools like Ansible, Terraform, Kubernetes, Flux, Renovate, and GitHub Actions.


⛵ Kubernetes

My Kubernetes cluster is deploy with Talos. 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 server with ZFS for NFS/SMB shares, bulk file storage and backups.

There is a template over at onedr0p/cluster-template if you want to try and follow along with some of the practices I use here.

Core Components

  • actions-runner-controller: Self-hosted Github runners.
  • cert-manager: Creates SSL certificates for services in my cluster.
  • cilium: Internal Kubernetes container networking interface.
  • cloudflared: Enables Cloudflare secure access to certain ingresses.
  • external-dns: Automatically syncs ingress DNS records to a DNS provider.
  • external-secrets: Managed Kubernetes secrets using 1Password Connect.
  • ingress-nginx: Kubernetes ingress controller using NGINX as a reverse proxy and load balancer.
  • rook: Distributed block storage for peristent storage.
  • sops: Managed secrets for Kubernetes and Terraform which are commited to Git.
  • spegel: Stateless cluster local OCI registry mirror.
  • tf-controller: Additional Flux component used to run Terraform from within a Kubernetes cluster.
  • volsync: Backup and recovery of persistent volume claims.

GitOps

Flux watches the clusters in my kubernetes folder (see Directories below) and makes the changes to my clusters based on the state of my Git repository.

The way Flux works for me here is it will recursively search the kubernetes/${cluster}/apps 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 (ks.yaml). Under the control of those Flux kustomizations there will be a HelmRelease or other resources related to the application 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.

📁 kubernetes
├── 📁 main            # main cluster
│   ├── 📁 apps           # applications
│   ├── 📁 bootstrap      # bootstrap procedures
│   ├── 📁 flux           # core flux configuration
│   └── 📁 templates      # re-useable components
└── 📁 storage         # storage cluster
    ├── 📁 apps           # applications
    ├── 📁 bootstrap      # bootstrap procedures
    └── 📁 flux           # core flux configuration

Flux Workflow

This is a high-level look how Flux deploys my applications with dependencies. Below there are 3 apps postgres, lldap and authelia. postgres is the first app that needs to be running and healthy before lldap and authelia. Once postgres is healthy lldap will be deployed and after that is healthy authelia will be deployed.

graph TD;
  id1>Kustomization: cluster] -->|Creates| id2>Kustomization: cluster-apps];
  id2>Kustomization: cluster-apps] -->|Creates| id3>Kustomization: postgres];
  id2>Kustomization: cluster-apps] -->|Creates| id6>Kustomization: lldap]
  id2>Kustomization: cluster-apps] -->|Creates| id8>Kustomization: authelia]
  id2>Kustomization: cluster-apps] -->|Creates| id5>Kustomization: postgres-cluster]
  id3>Kustomization: postgres] -->|Creates| id4[HelmRelease: postgres];
  id5>Kustomization: postgres-cluster] -->|Depends on| id3>Kustomization: postgres];
  id5>Kustomization: postgres-cluster] -->|Creates| id10[Postgres Cluster];
  id6>Kustomization: lldap] -->|Creates| id7(HelmRelease: lldap);
  id6>Kustomization: lldap] -->|Depends on| id5>Kustomization: postgres-cluster];
  id8>Kustomization: authelia] -->|Creates| id9(HelmRelease: authelia);
  id8>Kustomization: authelia] -->|Depends on| id5>Kustomization: postgres-cluster];
  id9(HelmRelease: authelia) -->|Depends on| id7(HelmRelease: lldap);

Networking

Click to see a high-level network diagram dns

☁️ Cloud Dependencies

While most of my infrastructure and workloads are self-hosted 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.

ServiceUseCost
1PasswordSecrets with External Secrets~$65/yr
CloudflareDomain and S3~$30/yr
FrugalUsenet access~$35/yr
GCPVoice interactions with Home Assistant over Google AssistantFree
GitHubHosting this repository and continuous integration/deploymentsFree
MigaduEmail hosting~$20/yr
PushoverKubernetes Alerts and application notifications$5 OTP
Terraform CloudStoring Terraform stateFree
UptimeRobotMonitoring internet connectivity and external facing applications~$60/yr
Total: ~$20/mo

🌐 DNS

Home DNS

On my Vyos router I have Bind9, blocky and dnsdist deployed as containers. In my cluster external-dns is deployed with the RFC2136 provider which syncs DNS records to bind9.

dnsdist is a DNS loadbalancer and has "downstream" DNS servers configured such as bind9 and blocky. All my clients use dnsdist as the upstream DNS server, this allows for more granularity with configuring DNS across my networks such as having all requests for my domain forward to bind9 on certain networks, or only using 1.1.1.1 instead of blocky on certain networks where adblocking isn't required.

Public DNS

Outside the external-dns instance mentioned above another instance is deployed in my cluster and configured to sync DNS records to Cloudflare. The only ingress 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 contain an ingress annotation external-dns.alpha.kubernetes.io/target.


🔧 Hardware

Click to see the rack! rack
DeviceCountOS Disk SizeData Disk SizeRamOperating SystemPurpose
Intel NUC8i5BEH31TB SSD1TB NVMe (rook-ceph)64GBTalosKubernetes Controllers
Intel NUC8i7BEH31TB SSD1TB NVMe (rook-ceph)64GBTalosKubernetes Workers
PowerEdge T34012TB SSD64GBUbuntu LTSNFS + Backup Server
Lenovo SA1201-10x22TB ZFS (mirrored vdevs)--DAS
Raspberry Pi 4132GB (SD)-4GBPiKVM (Arch)Network KVM
TESmart 8 Port KVM Switch1----Network KVM (PiKVM)
HP EliteDesk 800 G3 SFF1256GB NVMe-8GBVyos (Debian)Router
Unifi US-16-XG1----10Gb Core Switch
Unifi USW-Enterprise-24-PoE1----2.5Gb PoE Switch
Unifi UNVR1-4x8TB HDD--NVR
Unifi USP PDU Pro1----PDU
APC SMT1500RM2U w/ NIC1----UPS

⭐ Stargazers

Star History Chart


🤝 Gratitude and Thanks

Thanks to all the people who donate their time to the Home Operations Discord community. Be sure to check out kubesearch.dev for ideas on how to deploy applications or get ideas on what you may deploy.