Building My Homelab for DevOps

I’ve always wanted a safe space to experiment with DevOps tools, infrastructure automation, and service hosting without affecting production systems. Over time, my homelab has evolved into a miniature production-grade environment where I can test, learn, and iterate freely.

What is the purpose of this homelab?

The main goal of this homelab is learning DevOps by doing — testing Kubernetes, Terraform, and storage automation in a realistic setup. It also serves as a sandbox to explore CI/CD pipelines, observability stacks, and self-hosted services, all on hardware I control.

Hardware Setup

The core of my homelab consists of two Lenovo Tiny nodes, each with an Intel i5 (8th Gen) CPU and 32 GB RAM — compact, power-efficient, and perfect for 24×7 operation. On top of these nodes, I run a Proxmox cluster that manages all virtual machines. VM provisioning is currently manual via cloud-init, with configuration automated using Ansible.

Kubernetes Cluster

Within Proxmox, I run a 5-node K3s cluster for lightweight, production-style orchestration. K3s provides the full Kubernetes experience with a smaller footprint, ideal for edge or homelab environments.

Key Components

• Networking: MetalLB assigns load-balanced IPs from my LAN pool (10.0.0.0/16).
• Storage: TrueNAS VM (with 2 NVMe drives via passthrough) provides persistent volumes over NFS.
• Configuration Management: Ansible and Terraform maintain declarative consistency across the cluster.

This setup allows me to deploy, test, and tear down services easily while keeping configurations reusable.

Storage with TrueNAS

Storage is a critical piece of my lab. TrueNAS manages datasets for:

• Persistent Kubernetes volumes
• Configuration backups
• Base configuration files (e.g., Bind9)
• Other services like Plex

Each PVC mounts directly from NFS shares on TrueNAS.
To avoid permission issues, I’ve created dedicated TrueNAS users for services like Bind, ensuring smooth access control across the stack.

Infrastructure Automation

Automation is at the heart of this lab:

• Terraform manages network and DNS infrastructure.
• Ansible configures VMs and Kubernetes nodes.
• Kubernetes manifests define applications declaratively.

Currently, Terraform is triggered from my terminal, but I plan to integrate it into a CI/CD pipeline and store the state securely on NAS.

Future Plans

• Deploy Pi-hole for network-wide ad-blocking and local DNS caching
• Integrate Prometheus + Grafana for monitoring and alerting
• Fully automate provisioning with Terraform + Ansible pipelines
• Expand storage redundancy and backup policies for long-term reliability

What did I learn?

Running a homelab taught me more than theory ever could.
The biggest challenges were file permissions and TrueNAS access, but solving them deepened my understanding of storage, networking, and security integration.

In the next post, I’ll cover running Bind9 on Kubernetes and automating DNS with Terraform — a fully hands-on guide with manifests and code snippets.