Architecture

What I’m trying to achieve ?

To start, let’s introduce ourselves to homelabs and what they are. A homelab is an environment, computers in this context, equipped for experimentation or research. These labs can range from a single low powered device to several chunks of rack mounted devices. When I first gained an interest in homelabbing, my brain was wrapped around the idea of buying large servers and racking hardware.

Over the year I have discovered that a homelab does not require huge server (at least not anymore). Big concept can be run on smaller hardware as long as you are curious about it.

My goal is to have an education environment where I can explore various DevOps techniques. Build it from scratch is also a great learning experience that helps me to understand architecture, infrastructure, networking, and so.

Ano advantage of building it from the bottom up is that, if something breaks, I can rebuild it myself with ease. Given I know myself, I tend to break, rebuild and rebreak things over an over. Therefore my homelab must have a significant level of automation to expedite each rebuild.

Finally, I am using this homelab to host a series of services I use at home; either for home automation, media streaming and coding. Also the key uptime metric is the overall WAF (Wife Approuval Factor).