Just finished revamping my Kubernetes cluster, built on Talos OS and Proxmox.
The cluster uses 2 N100 CPU-based mini PCs, both retrofitted with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of NVME SSDs. They are happily tucked away under my TV :).
Last week I accidentally destroyed my cluster's data and had to rebuild everything from zero. Homelabs are made to be broken, I guess… but it made me realise how painful my old bootstrapping process actually was.
To avoid all the pain, I decided to do a major revamp of the process.
I threw out all the old bash scripts and replaced them with 8 very separated Terraform (OpenTofu under the hood) stages. This was just my attempt at making homelab infra feel a bit more like real engineering instead of fragile scripts and prayers.
The entire thing can now be deployed with a single command and, from zero you end up with:
* Proxmox creating Talos OS VMs.
* Full Gitops and modern networking with ArgoCD and Cilium. Everything is declaratively installed and Gitops driven.
* Hashipcorp Vault preloading randomly generated passwords, keys and secrets, ready for all services to use.
Using Taskfile and Nix flakes, the setup process is completely reproducible from one system to the next.
Would love to get some feedback on your thoughts on the structure of what I did here. Are there any better solutions for storing local Terraform state that local disk, that's homelab friendly?
Hopefully this can help some people and provide some inspiration too!
itigges22•2h ago
I very much understand the pain of a broken homelab/ proxmox setup! Has made me want to do something similar for a while! I have dealt with old RAM crashing, PSUs going out, HDD's breaking, Proxmox Kernel Panic (idk how, but it happened for me). Having something that allows me to redeploy with a single command is amazing.
okwilkins•2h ago
The cluster uses 2 N100 CPU-based mini PCs, both retrofitted with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of NVME SSDs. They are happily tucked away under my TV :).
Last week I accidentally destroyed my cluster's data and had to rebuild everything from zero. Homelabs are made to be broken, I guess… but it made me realise how painful my old bootstrapping process actually was.
To avoid all the pain, I decided to do a major revamp of the process.
I threw out all the old bash scripts and replaced them with 8 very separated Terraform (OpenTofu under the hood) stages. This was just my attempt at making homelab infra feel a bit more like real engineering instead of fragile scripts and prayers.
The entire thing can now be deployed with a single command and, from zero you end up with:
* Proxmox creating Talos OS VMs. * Full Gitops and modern networking with ArgoCD and Cilium. Everything is declaratively installed and Gitops driven. * Hashipcorp Vault preloading randomly generated passwords, keys and secrets, ready for all services to use.
Using Taskfile and Nix flakes, the setup process is completely reproducible from one system to the next.
All of this can be found on my repo in this section here: https://github.com/okwilkins/h8s/tree/main/infrastructure
Would love to get some feedback on your thoughts on the structure of what I did here. Are there any better solutions for storing local Terraform state that local disk, that's homelab friendly?
Hopefully this can help some people and provide some inspiration too!