This is a monorepository is for my home kubernetes clusters. I try to adhere to Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and GitOps practices using tools like Kubernetes, Flux, Renovate, and GitHub Actions.
The purpose here is to learn k8s, while practicing Gitops.
There is a template over at onedr0p/cluster-template if you want to try and follow along with some of the practices I use here.
My clusters run talos linux immutable kubernetes OS. This is a semi-hyper-converged cluster, workloads and block storage are sharing the same available resources on my nodes while I have a separate NAS server running TrueNAS with NFS/SMB shares, bulk file storage and backups.
- actions-runner-controller: self-hosted Github runners
- cilium: internal Kubernetes networking plugin
- cert-manager: creates SSL certificates for services in my cluster
- external-dns: automatically syncs DNS records from my cluster ingresses to a DNS provider
- external-secrets: managed Kubernetes secrets using Bitwarden.
- ingress-nginx: ingress controller for Kubernetes using NGINX as a reverse proxy and load balancer
- rook-ceph: Cloud native distributed block storage for Kubernetes
- sops: managed secrets for Kubernetes, Ansible, and Terraform which are committed to Git
- spegel: stateless cluster local OCI registry mirror
- volsync: backup and recovery of persistent volume claims
Flux watches the clusters in my kubernetes folder (see Directories below) and makes the changes to my clusters based on the state of my Git repository.
The way Flux works for me here is it will recursively search the kubernetes/${cluster}/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
├── 📁 main # main cluster
│ ├── 📁 apps # applications
│ ├── 📁 bootstrap # bootstrap procedures
│ ├── 📁 flux # core flux configuration
│ └── 📁 templates # re-useable components
└── 📁 ... # other clustersThis is a high-level look how Flux deploys my applications with dependencies. Below there are 3 Flux kustomizations postgres, postgres-cluster, and atuin. postgres is the first app that needs to be running and healthy before postgres-cluster and once postgres-cluster is healthy atuin will be deployed.
graph TD;
id1>Kustomization: cluster] -->|Creates| id2>Kustomization: cluster-apps];
id2>Kustomization: cluster-apps] -->|Creates| id3>Kustomization: postgres];
id2>Kustomization: cluster-apps] -->|Creates| id5>Kustomization: postgres-cluster]
id2>Kustomization: cluster-apps] -->|Creates| id8>Kustomization: atuin]
id3>Kustomization: postgres] -->|Creates| id4[HelmRelease: postgres];
id5>Kustomization: postgres-cluster] -->|Depends on| id3>Kustomization: postgres];
id5>Kustomization: postgres-cluster] -->|Creates| id10[Postgres Cluster];
id8>Kustomization: atuin] -->|Creates| id9(HelmRelease: atuin);
id8>Kustomization: atuin] -->|Depends on| id5>Kustomization: postgres-cluster];
While 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 three things. (1) Dealing with chicken/egg scenarios, (2) services I critically need whether my cluster is online or not and (3) The "hit by a bus factor" - what happens to critical apps (e.g. email, password manager, photos) that my family relies on when I no longer around.
Alternative solutions to the first two of these problems would be to host a Kubernetes cluster in the cloud and deploy applications like HCVault, Vaultwarden, ntfy, and Gatus; however, maintaining another cluster and monitoring another group of workloads would be more work and probably be more or equal out to the same costs as described below.
| Service | Use | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| BitWarden | Secrets with External Secrets | ~$10/yr |
| Cloudflare | Domain and S3 | ~$30/yr |
| GitHub | Hosting this repository and continuous integration/deployments | Free |
| Pushover | Kubernetes Alerts and application notifications | $5 OTP |
| Healthchecks.io | Monitoring internet connectivity and external facing applications | Free |
| Total: ~$5/mo |
Big shout out to original cluster-template, and the Home Operations Discord community.
Be sure to check out kubesearch.dev for ideas on how to deploy applications or get ideas on what you may deploy.
See my commit histroy commit history