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Introduction

Welcome to the Kubernights Homelab Journey

In a world where digital resilience, full-stack automation, and ownership over your own infrastructure matter more than ever, the need for a personal, production-grade homelab became more than just a dream — it became a mission, a necessity, and a philosophical stance against vendor lock-in and opaque cloud pricing.

🎯 Motivation Behind the Homelab​

The Kubernights Homelab is not simply a playground.
It was born out of the convergence of several fundamental pillars:

  • The desire to experiment freely, without the constraints imposed by credit cards, cloud service providers, or artificial quotas. Real learning happens when the infrastructure bends to your will, not when your budget dictates your experiments.
  • The ambition to simulate real-world production environments, bridging the gap between theory and practice.
    We didn’t want mock labs or fake projects — we aimed to mirror the complexity, reliability, and challenges of real DevOps and SRE environments.
  • The obsession with hands-on mastery of Cloud Native technologies.
    From bare-metal provisioning to Kubernetes cluster federation, GitOps pipelines, observability stacks, and security hardening — the Kubernights Homelab would touch it all.
  • The unyielding drive for total control: of the network, of the services, of the upgrades, of the pipelines.
    Understanding every single moving part, no black boxes allowed. Infrastructure should be explainable, reproducible, and understood, not just clicked together.

Thus, the Kubernights Homelab was born —
Piece by piece, service by service, decision by decision.

🧱 Foundational Principles​

This project is not just technical. It is ideological.
Certain non-negotiable principles have been defined since day one:

1. Embrace Open Source​

Wherever possible — and that means almost always — we will:

  • Choose open-source applications and platforms over proprietary ones.
  • Prioritize community-driven projects that align with the principles of transparency, auditability, and independence.
  • Contribute back when opportunities arise.

Why?
Because Open Source is not just free — it is freedom.
It ensures we are not locked into licenses, opaque upgrades, or closed ecosystems.

2. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) First​

Everything that can be defined as code, must be defined as code.

  • All cloud resources, VMs, storage, networking — managed via Terraform.
  • All Kubernetes objects — deployed via Helm, GitOps (ArgoCD), or raw YAML manifests, versioned and auditable.

Why?
Because manual operations rot systems over time. Code brings:

  • Repeatability
  • Auditability
  • Disaster recovery capabilities
  • Faster innovation without fear

3. Automate the Builders Themselves​

Terraform alone is not enough — how we manage our Terraform also matters.

Therefore, our pipelines will:

  • Automatically validate and lint Terraform code using terraform fmt on every Merge Request.
  • Automatically generate and update documentation with tools like terraform-docs, ensuring that every module is self-explanatory and easier for contributors to understand.
  • Enforce quality gates: no unformatted or undocumented code can reach production.

Why?
Because clean code is maintainable code. And maintainable code is production-ready code.

4. GitOps All the Things​

Infrastructure deployments, application releases, cluster upgrades — everything will flow from Git:

  • Git is the single source of truth.
  • Git defines the desired state.
  • Git triggers the pipelines.
  • Git tracks the history, the approvals, the rollbacks.

Why?
Because GitOps isn't just a trend — it is the next evolutionary step of DevOps. It bridges the gap between Dev and Ops naturally, through auditability, simplicity, and automation.

5. Security is a Process, Not a Checkbox​

From day zero:

  • Secrets will be managed externally (via tools like external-secrets).
  • Access will be minimal, controlled, and audited.
  • Certificates will be automated, rotated, and renewed without human intervention (via cert-manager).
  • Administrative access will be secured with strict Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) where possible.

Why?
Because security cannot be added later. It must be designed and built into every layer.

🚀 What to Expect from This Journey​

Throughout these documentation pages, you will find:

  • The decisions — and the whys behind them.
  • The tools — and how we chose between alternatives.
  • The scripts — and the automation we built.
  • The challenges — and how we solved (or worked around) them.
  • The dreams — and the roadmap for what comes next.

This is not just a "how-to" guide. It is a philosophical and technical journey into the very essence of modern, cloud-native, self-hosted infrastructure.

Let’s dive in.

Welcome to the Kubernights Homelab.

🌙🚀🛞