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 the tools like Ansible, Kubernetes, Flux, Renovate and GitHub Actions.
There is a template over at onedr0p/flux-cluster-template if you wanted to try and follow along with some of the practices I use here.
My Kubernetes cluster is deployed 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 for (NFS) file storage.
- actions-runner-controller: Self-hosted Github runners.
- cert-manager: Creates SSL certificates for services in my Kubernetes cluster.
- cilium: Internal Kubernetes networking plugin.
- cloudflared: Enables Cloudflare secure access to certain ingresses.
- external-dns: Automatically manages DNS records from my cluster in a cloud DNS provider.
- external-secrets: Managed Kubernetes secrets using 1Password Connect.
- ingress-nginx: Ingress controller to expose HTTP traffic to pods over DNS.
- longhorn: Distributed block storage for peristent storage.
- sops: Managed secrets for Kubernetes, Ansible.
- spegel: Stateless cluster local OCI registry mirror.
Flux watches my kubernetes folder (see Directories below) and makes the changes to my cluster based on the YAML manifests.
The way Flux works for me here is it will recursively search the kubernetes/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. Those Flux kustomizations will generally have a HelmRelease or other resources related to the application underneath it 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.
This Git repository contains the following directories under kubernetes.
📁 kubernetes # Kubernetes cluster defined as code
├─📁 bootstrap # Flux installation
├─📁 flux # Main Flux configuration of repository
└─📁 apps # Apps deployed into my cluster grouped by namespace (see below)Below is a a high level look at the layout of how my directory structure with Flux works. In this brief example you are able to see that authelia will not be able to run until glauth and cloudnative-pg are running. It also shows that the Cluster custom resource depends on the cloudnative-pg Helm chart. This is needed because cloudnative-pg installs the Cluster custom resource definition in the Helm chart.
# Key: <kind> :: <metadata.name>
GitRepository :: home-ops-kubernetes
Kustomization :: cluster
Kustomization :: cluster-apps
Kustomization :: cluster-apps-authelia
DependsOn:
Kustomization :: cluster-apps-glauth
Kustomization :: cluster-apps-cloudnative-pg-cluster
HelmRelease :: authelia
Kustomization :: cluster-apps-glauth
HelmRelease :: glauth
Kustomization :: cluster-apps-cloudnative-pg
HelmRelease :: cloudnative-pg
Kustomization :: cluster-apps-cloudnative-pg-cluster
DependsOn:
Kustomization :: cluster-apps-cloudnative-pg
Cluster :: postgresWhile most of my infrastructure and workloads are selfhosted 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.
| Service | Use | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 1Password | Secrets with External Secrets | ~$65/yr |
| Cloudflare | Domain, DNS and proxy management | ~$30/yr |
| GitHub | Hosting this repository and continuous integration/deployments | Free |
| Healthchecks.io | External alerting if cluster goes down | Free |
| Total: ~$8/mo |
External access to my cluster is done using a Cloudflare tunnel. This works to prevent me from having to open ports in my router / firewall, as you would normally have to do to allow access to internal services.
My pfSense router serves as my Internal DNS server and is listening on :53. All DNS queries for my domains are forwarded to k8s_gateway that is running in my cluster. With this setup k8s_gateway has direct access to my clusters ingresses and services and serves DNS for them in my internal network.
My pfSense router is utilizing the pfBlockerNG plugin which allows me to filter out known ad-serving sites & domains.
external-dns is deployed in my cluster and configure to sync DNS records to Cloudflare. The only ingresses external-dns looks at to gather DNS records to put in Cloudflare are ones that have an annotation of external-dns.alpha.kubernetes.io/target
Click to see da rack!
| Device | Count | OS Disk Size | Data Disk Size | Ram | Operating System | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Supermicro SuperServer 1U | 1 | 256GB NVMe | - | 16GB | pfSense | Router |
| Intel NUC11PAHi7 | 3 | 250GB SSD | 2TB NVMe (longhorn) | 64GB | Debian | Kubernetes Masters |
| Intel NUC11PAHi7 | 1 | 250GB SSD | 1TB NVMe | 64GB | XCP-NG | VM Hypervisor |
| Custom Storage Server | 1 | 2x 250GB SSD | 6x14TB ZFS (mirrored vdevs) | 128GB | TrueNas Scale | NFS + Backup Server |
| APC SMT3000 w/ NIC | 1 | - | - | - | - | UPS |
| Dell 8132F | 1 | - | - | - | - | Core 10Gb Switch |
| Dell X1052 | 1 | - | - | - | - | Service Switch |
Thanks to all the people who donate their time to the Kubernetes @Home Discord community. A lot of inspiration for my cluster comes from the people that have shared their clusters using the k8s-at-home GitHub topic. Be sure to check out the Kubernetes @Home search for ideas on how to deploy applications or get ideas on what you can deploy. Also a massive thanks to onedr0p specifically for spending so much time cultivating this entire project, and helping people with questions along the way.
See my realllllly bad commit history
See LICENSE
![@renovate[bot]](https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/in/2740?s=64&v=4){kind=small}