About this website

Obviously, this website is hosted by me and runs on my homelab. What started out in 2018 as a measly raspberry pi, quickly grew to a couple of pi's and an HP microserver as shown in the feature image.

Currently my favorite host OS is Proxmox Virtual Environment. Using Proxmox I learned all there is to ZFS and virtual machines in general. I've tinkered with Linux containers, but right now most services are run inside a VM using docker containers. This website is running inside one of them.

Soon, however, I hope to swap out my single point of failure for a cluster of microservers. These will probably run some sort of Kubernetes for microservices, but also highly available VMs for special workloads. Such as my home assistant install.

Currently, I'm working on how to manage the cluster. Preferably the cluster is able to boot and provision by itself. This means some microservice with access to the IPMI interfaces of the servers to boot them and some kind of PXE server for provisioning on the first run.

Canonical MAAS looks like the perfect candidate. However, its free tier only offers ubuntu integration. And that might not be the perfect fit as the cluster is a bit resource constrained. Rancher Harvester also looks like a really good candidate, but it's missing a PXE server out of the box. If these two could be combined we might have a winner. But there's also Tinkerbell from Equinix Metal that might fit this bill.