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 tools like Kubernetes, Flux, Renovate and GitHub Actions.
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.
My Kubernetes cluster is deployed with Talos. This is a hyper-converged cluster, workloads and block storage are sharing the same available resources on my nodes with some larger volumes mounted on specific nodes with off-site backups.
- 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-authentik
DependsOn:
Kustomization :: cluster-apps-cloudnative-pg-cluster
HelmRelease :: authentik
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 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.
| Service | Use | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 1Password | Secrets with External Secrets | ~$65/yr |
| Cloudflare | Domain, DNS and proxy management, R2 backups | ~$30/yr |
| Backblaze B2 | B2 backups for disaster recovery | ~$72/yr |
| GitHub | Hosting this repository and continuous integration/deployments | Free |
| Total: ~$14/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. I also have some additional web services for my other domains that route directly to the service off the tunnel.
My opnSense 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 opnSense router is utilizing blocklists with Unbound 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 or that I explicitly allow for other hosted sites.
Click to see da rack!
| Device | Count | OS Disk Size | Data Disk Size | Ram | Operating System | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Proctli VP2420 | 1 | 128GB NVMe | 32GB | opnSense | Router | |
| Supermicro 5019D-FTN4 | 1 | 1TB NVMe | 2 TB SATA SSD | 128GB | Talos | Kubernetes Master |
| ODroid H4 | 2 | 2TB NVMe (longhorn) | 32GB | Talos | Kubernetes Masters | |
| Beelink N5095 | 1 | 2TB SATA SSD | 8GB | Talos | Kubernetes Worker (Frigate) | |
| CyberPower OL1500RTXL2U | 1 | - | - | - | - | UPS |
| QNAP QSW-M3216R-8S8T | 1 | - | - | - | - | Core 10Gb Switch |
| Unifi USW-16-POE | 1 | - | - | - | - | Service Switch (PoE) |
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