HasnainWaris

For the longest time, I’ve always for the longest time seen cool projects by my fellow Admins and Engineers. Building their own servers, homelab, applications etc. I thought to myself why not me. I figured too much time commitment, hardware commitment, what would I create or build etc.

I realized those were just excuses, if I am passionate about it I’ll find the time. Hardware? Old laptop is more than enough (also building on raspberry pis, super cool). What to build? Anything I want.

So I went ahead and took that step, lot of tutorials and guides later I am just about there. I figured why not write up a short recap.

The homelab is still a work in progress, but it will always be. The main idea was to get it up and running in the first place.

Grabbed an old laptop, installed Ubuntu and got started.

First thing to do was decide which container orchestration tool I wanted to go with, ended up going with K3s and it was a great decision. A quick, easy and lightweight Kubernetes distribution that’s perfect for learning and smaller environments. For someone transitioning from traditional sysadmin work to DevOps and container orchestration, K3s lets me get hands-on with Kubernetes without the overhead of a full production cluster setup.

After getting k3s setup, next was setting up Flux. After seeing some guides and suggestions of GitOps I figured why not. I wanted to get a feel of the GitOps workflow and have a feel of it not in a production environment but simulating it in my home lab. After getting a feel of Flux, I can’t imagine running my cluster any other way. From a SysAdmin POV with experience in something like Ansible. I love the idea of controlling state of an application or machine with files. Flux watches my Git repo and automatically syncs changes to the cluster. Defining the state of our cluster from a single point of truth with our GitHub repository, lovely.

Avoiding manually declaring resources and instead letting Flux take care of that. I enjoyed following the Flux repository structure as well (https://fluxcd.io/flux/guides/repository-structure/) a great way to structure and keep a clean repository. It was definitely more difficult to grasp and structure theoretically. But once in action further applications were much easier to setup.

K3s done, Flux done. Now to host applications. I won’t expand too much on the simple setup of storage, service, namespace and deployment. Setting up my first application (Linkding, a bookmark manager) on the cluster felt like such a win. Once the initial homelab setup is done, hosting applications becomes straightforward. The trickiest aspect can be networking, which I’ll probably look to tackle in a separate post

I’ll wrap it here for this post, but this is just the start of the homelab. I look forward to growing it, expanding upon this and learning so much more and I’ll be sure to share it as well.

Thank you for reading, see you in the next post!