Homelabs have become a bit of a hobby and a practical necessity for many IT professionals, and for me, it sits right at the intersection of personal curiosity, skill development, and ensuring rock-solid infrastructure for a fully remote work life. I wanted to share a look into my own setup in Texas, how I keep myself online (rain or shine), and the blend of hardware and software that makes it all possible.

Why I Built a Homelab⌗

A homelab isn’t just about tinkering with cool tech. It is where I keep my automation dreams alive, stay ahead on new tools and technologies, and test out ideas well before proposing them at work. It lets me break things safely, automate routine tasks around the house, and ultimately, be a more confident and effective professional.

Reliability is also a big deal for me. I work from home and cannot afford extended outages, so I have engineered my setup to handle both internet and power hiccups seamlessly.

My personal workstation (and gaming rig) connects over 10Gbps fiber to the network. The fast connection makes it possible for me to use iSCSI storage straight from the server, which is especially handy for something like my ever-growing Steam library.

Always-On Connectivity, No Matter What⌗

My internet setup consists of two ISPs: AT&T Fiber for primary, and T-Mobile 5G as my backup. My Mikrotik router is configured to automatically fail over between them whenever there is an outage. Being offline is simply not an option, especially with my livelihood on the line. A 1152Wh UPS also stands by for short power blips, while a natural gas generator is there for anything more serious.

Performance Hardware in the Heat⌗

All of my core networking equipment lives out in the garage, which means it is regularly tested by true Texas summers. Temperatures in there can exceed 100F, but I have been genuinely impressed at how modern hardware soldiers on through the heat. Even at the hottest point of the year, CPU temperatures rarely pass 60C. Admittedly, the fan noise is formidable during those stretches.

The Heart of My Homelab: The Kubernetes Cluster⌗

This is where things get interesting. Almost everything I run is containerized and managed through a three-node Kubernetes cluster (a Dell R720 and two R630s), aside from a couple of core services on bare metal.

Here’s a peek at the services that keep my digital home humming:

  • Traefik: Ingress and TLS termination in front of every service, with cert-manager auto-provisioning certificates behind it.
  • MetalLB & MetalLB DNS: Hands out virtual IPs to services that need direct L4 exposure, and keeps internal DNS in sync with them automatically.
  • Tailscale: My solution for secure remote access without exposing anything directly to the internet.
  • Longhorn & NFS CSI: Replicated block storage plus NFS-backed volumes for anything that needs shared storage.
  • GitLab Runner: Everything, from infrastructure to deployments, is managed as code. Self-hosting a runner keeps my CI private and versatile.
  • SigNoz, Prometheus & Grafana: One place to track logs, traces, and metrics from everything running in the cluster.
  • Zabbix: Classic monitoring for everything from core services to random household sensors.
  • GPU Operator: Shares a single GPU across Ollama, Jellyfin’s hardware transcoding, and a couple of my own inference services.
  • Omada & SaltStack: Central management for my wireless access points, and for the bare-metal side of things.
  • Docmost & Nextcloud: My internal wiki (where I even draft posts like this) and a private alternative to Dropbox.
  • Home Assistant: The brains of my smart home. Lights, sensors, shopping lists, and plenty more.
  • A handful of my own projects: A BirdNET pipeline that IDs birds from yard audio, a GPS tracker for my phone, and a background-removal pipeline for product photos. Small services I build whenever I want an excuse to try something new.

Some services still run directly on the Dell R720, outside Kubernetes, for performance and reliability:

  • iSCSI Target: The main engine for bulk storage. This is what powers my speedy, shared Steam folder.
  • NFS Server: Handles persistent storage requests coming from the cluster.

Homelab Topology⌗

While words get you so far, a diagram really shows what’s going on under the hood. Here’s the same high-level topology map I keep in my internal docs, covering hardware, network paths, and the services running on top:

Final Thoughts⌗

Running a homelab like this is both fun and incredibly rewarding. It keeps my skills sharp, ensures that I am never caught off guard by outages, and lets me explore a truly impressive open source ecosystem. If you are considering building one, I would encourage you to start small and grow as your needs and interests evolve.