kochhaus-home - a mono-repo for my homelab

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

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

My Kubernetes clusters are deployed with Talos. They are hyper-converged clusters, 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.

• Networking & Service Mesh: cilium provides eBPF-based networking, while envoy powers service-to-service communication with L7 proxying and traffic management. cloudflared secures ingress traffic via Cloudflare, and external-dns keeps DNS records in sync automatically.
• Security & Secrets: cert-manager automates SSL/TLS certificate management. For secrets, I use external-secrets with 1Password Connect to inject secrets into Kubernetes, and sops to store and manage encrypted secrets in Git.
• Storage & Data Protection: rook or longhorn provide distributed storage for persistent volumes, with volsync handling backups and restores. harbor improves reliability by running a site-wide OCI image mirror.
• Automation & CI/CD: actions-runner-controller runs self-hosted GitHub Actions runners directly in the cluster for continuous integration workflows.

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.

Yes, this is a lot of infrastructure and heavy lifting - the point is to experiment with Kubernetes and GitOps in a safe space.

This Git repository contains the following directories under Kubernetes.

📁 kubernetes
├── 📁 main            # main cluster
│   ├── 📁 apps           # applications
│   ├── 📁 components     # re-useable components
│   └── 📁 flux           # core flux configuration
└── 📁 registry        # registry cluster (running harbor)
    ├── 📁 apps           # applications
    └── 📁 flux           # core flux configuration

Click here to see my high-level network diagram

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 three things. (1) Dealing with chicken/egg scenarios, (2) services I critically need whether my cluster is online or not and (3) The "hit by a bus factor" - what happens to critical apps (e.g. Email, Password Manager, Photos) that my family relies on when I no longer around.

Alternative solutions to the first two of these 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 would be more work and probably be more or equal out to the same costs as described below.

I have a pair of Raspberry Pi 4s running Bind9 and blocky deployed.

In my cluster there are two instances of ExternalDNS running. One for syncing private DNS records to the primary Bind instance, while another instance syncs public DNS to Cloudflare. This setup is managed by creating httproutes with two specific classes: internal for private DNS and external for public DNS. The external-dns instances then syncs the DNS records to their respective platforms accordingly.

Big shout out to original cluster-template, and 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 could deploy.