• 
  

  Tue, Feb 4, 2025

• 
  4-minute read

The year was 2024, Cyber Monday was rolling by and my manager pointed out that
I still had a budget available for training and certifications. One purchase of
a Kubestronaut Certification Bundle
and a few weeks later, I kinda have to face it: I need a new home lab.

Motivation

So why a home lab exactly? Well, I have a few reasons:

1. It’s fun.
2. Haven’t we all have a pile of hardware lying around, bought with the best intentions?
   Let’s actually use it for something!
3. Cloud providers, well, provide a lot of stuff, so their customers don’t
   have to think about it, and I kinda want to think about it when learning.
   Same goes for the likes of minikube and
   kind. They have easy to use plugins for features such as
   ingress and storage. That makes them easy to use, but not the best for learning.

Goals

1. Achieve feature parity with a small cloud provider. What do I mean by that?
   I want things to work out of the box: ingress, storage, monitoring & logging,
   identity & access management (IAM), … let’s see how many parts this
   series ends up having.
2. Everything defined as code. I want to be able to tear down and rebuild my
   cluster with a few commands, enabling us to try things without fear of breaking
   stuff. If we do, we just rebuild it.
3. HTTPS everywhere, I want to have a valid certificate and a proper domain for
   every service I deploy, none of that self-signed crap.

Non-Goals

1. High avail