I recently moved all my stuff to a homelab cluster — here’s how that went and what I learned along the way.

Why Homelab?

After years of running services across various cloud providers, I decided it was time to bring everything home. The benefits were clear:

  • Cost savings — no more monthly cloud bills for personal projects
  • Learning — nothing teaches you Kubernetes like running it yourself
  • Full control — my hardware, my rules, my data

The Hardware

I went with a modest but capable setup:

  • 3x Intel NUCs (i5, 32GB RAM each)
  • A managed switch with VLAN support
  • A Firewalla Gold Pro for network security (yes, I unboxed it on YouTube)

Software Stack

# The core components
cluster:
  orchestration: k3s
  gitops: ArgoCD
  ingress: Traefik
  storage: Longhorn
  monitoring: Prometheus + Grafana
  secrets: SOPS + Age

Lessons Learned

  1. Storage is the hardest part — distributed storage on bare metal is no joke. Longhorn saved me, but I had to learn the hard way that not all SSDs are created equal.

  2. DNS matters more than you think — split-horizon DNS with Pi-hole took a few iterations to get right.

  3. Backups are non‑negotiable — a firmware update bricked one of my NUCs. Velero turned that from a panic into a restore job.

What’s Next

I want to add GPU passthrough for some local LLM work and a bit of fun “overkill homelab” experimentation.

If you’re thinking about building your own homelab cluster, honestly: go for it. The learning experience alone is worth it.