Ship early, ship often, even when WIP, the content will be released in phases, as soon as it's ready. Year 1, Key Take Away #5Most homelab enthusiasts think Kubernetes is excessive, so they stick with simpler tools like Docker and Ansible. When containers fail, they intervene manually and miss out on true automation.
When Mischa van den Burg created his first Kubernetes deployment with three (3) replicas, killed a container, and watched it automatically resurrect itself, he knew that this was the setup he really wanted. That feeling of seeing a rolling update happen flawlessly is something that you can't understand until you experience it first-hand. The automatic rollback when something goes wrong is the true epiphany.
If you want a homelab that runs as reliably as professional cloud infrastructure, you need to consider what begins as overkill, but starts making more sense after some hands-on experience.
Mischa takes us on a quick tour of his sustainable Kubernetes homelab setup built from recycled enterprise hardware, all while maintaining a minimalist approach.
☸️ 4-node Kubernetes cluster built with affordable refurbished hardware
💻 Control plane running on a ThinkPad T430
🗃️ Three worker nodes using HP EliteDesks (~€170 each)
🐧 Minimalist Arch Linux setup with Wayland and Hyperland
🏡 Homepage as his central dashboard for all services
🦘 Wallabag for saving and storing articles
👔 Linkding for browser-agnostic bookmark management
🐘 PostgreSQL databases for data persistence