Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
115 lines (71 loc) · 7.49 KB

README.md

File metadata and controls

115 lines (71 loc) · 7.49 KB

home-ops - a mono-repo for my homelab

... automated via Flux, Renovate and GitHub Actions 🐟

Discord  

Overview

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

The purpose here is to learn Kubernetes, while practicing GitOps. I have two longer-term goals:

  1. migrate many of the services that I currently run on different raspberry pi's or servers around the house into a single, congruous k8s environment

⛵ Kubernetes

There is a template over at onedr0p/flux-cluster-template if you want to try and follow along with some of the practices I use here.

Installation

My cluster is built using k3s, provisioned on bare-metal debian Linux using the Ansible galaxy role ansible-role-k3s. This is a hyper-converged cluster, workloads and block storage are sharing the same available resources on my nodes. I also have a separate NAS server with ZFS for NFS shares, bulk file storage and backups.

Core Components

  • actions-runner-controller: self-hosted Github runners
  • cert-manager: Configured to create TLS certs for all ingress services automatically using LetsEncrypt.
  • external-dns: monitors service and ingress resources, and automatically generates DNS updates for them. This lets me maintain DNS mappings and LetsEncrypt certificates without a cloudflare account or domain.
  • external-secrets: managed Kubernetes secrets using 1Password.
  • ingress-nginx: ingress controller for Kubernetes using NGINX as a reverse proxy and load balancer
  • sops: managed secrets for Kubernetes, Ansible, and Terraform which are committed to Git

GitOps

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/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.

Directories

This Git repository contains the following directories under Kubernetes.

📁 kubernetes
├── 📁 apps           # applications
├── 📁 bootstrap      # bootstrap procedures
├── 📁 flux           # core flux configuration
└── 📁 templates      # re-useable components

☁️ Cloud Dependencies

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 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 ~$60/yr
Cloudflare Domain and S3 Free
GitHub Hosting this repository and continuous integration/deployments Free
Total: ~$5/mo

🌐 DNS

Home DNS

In cluster I run blocky deployed. In my cluster external-dns is deployed with the RFC2136 provider which syncs DNS records to. blocky is used by non-servers as ad-blocking and caching proxy.

Public DNS

The external-dns instance mentioned above another instance is deployed in my cluster and configured to sync DNS records to Cloudflare. The only ingress this external-dns instance looks at to gather DNS records to put in Cloudflare are ones that have an ingress class name of external and contain an ingress annotation external-dns.alpha.kubernetes.io/target.

🔧 Hardware

Main Kubernetes Cluster

Node CPU RAM Storage Function OS
Beelink EQ13 Intel N200 16GB 512Gib SSD control-plane Talos
Beelink EQ13 Intel N200 16GB 512Gib SSD control-plane Talos
Beelink EQ13 Intel N200 16GB 512Gib SSD control-plane Talos

Bulk storage

Node CPU RAM Storage Function OS
CM3588 Quad-core ARM Cortex-A76 and quad-core Cortex-A55 CPU 16GB 4* 4 Tib SSD Bulk storage Debian

I fully intend to replace the raspberry pis with something with a little more oompfh at some point in the future, perhaps more cm3588's, perhaps something else.

Big shout out to original flux-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 may deploy.