My Homelab

I run everything I can on my own hardware. Not because cloud services are bad — but because running your own infrastructure teaches you things no tutorial ever will. Every outage is a lesson, every migration is a puzzle, and every late-night debug session builds intuition that carries over to professional work.

My homelab started with a Raspberry Pi and a dream. It has grown into a multi-node Proxmox cluster with redundant storage, automated deployments, and more services than I sometimes remember deploying. Everything is managed through Infrastructure as Code — OpenTofu for provisioning, Docker Compose for services, and automated monitoring to catch problems before they become outages.

The architecture follows a simple principle: separate concerns into dedicated VMs, containerize services, and manage everything as code. The Proxmox hypervisor runs five VMs, each with a clear responsibility — infrastructure services, web hosting, media automation, development tools, and monitoring.

All external traffic flows through Cloudflare Tunnels into Traefik reverse proxies, which handle TLS termination, routing, and authentication via Authentik (OIDC/SAML). Internal services communicate over a flat network with firewall rules controlling access between VMs.

Infrastructure changes go through a GitOps pipeline: push to the homelab-iac repo, OpenTofu plans the change, a PR gets reviewed, and on merge the change is applied automatically with Discord notifications at each step. Docker stacks are versioned in a separate repo with compose files and environment configurations.