homelab VS sidero

K3s is great, I use it on all of my personal clusters (here and here). It's lightweight and very easy to manage.

https://github.com/khuedoan/homelab if you haven't come across it yet. To add to your bookmarks.

I have my Kubernetes homelab public on GitHub, everything is automated and defined as code. Hope it will help you get started and see what's possible.

So I 've got inspired by https://github.com/khuedoan/homelab and initially after lurking this sub for a while I came up with a plan to consider some of these solutions: - openmediavault as a VM to use 2x4TB /w ext4 & mergerFS or TrueNAS in RAID1 - I think mergerFS gives more options to increase storage with extra drives later, but I don't plan to hoard lots of data. Also rather opted for tiered cache via SSD to save some power but if such lot of VMs would write this would work? - nextcloud VM to easiely manage files via browser and have mobile app sync for photos with some kind of gallery plugins etc - I think this may be optional if there's other solution as nextcloud seems to not be light. Or something like Seafile would be enough? - kubernetes - k3s/microk8s single VM node or 2 VM nodes - would I need more? and so - can then openmediavault be used as a storage for it like TrueNAS? - Rancher - if used k3s - I quite liked the UI of rancher desktop, more than portainer when I tried with microk8s, but I don't pass on using something else, eg. Lens - Gitea - for hosting code - tekton / teamcity - for running tests and commit build hooks - fluxCD / argoCD - for deploying builds to kubernetes

khuedoan/homelab

Here's my project (running on 4 mini PC) that I'm using for learning and self-hosting https://github.com/khuedoan/homelab, it's fully automated from empty disk to operating services.

You can checkout my repo If you'd like to do the same for your homelab (it's also modular so you can just use the OS installation part)

Here're the links to the Markdown source and the web view.

You can checkout my Kubernetes homelab, it's fully automated from empty disk, very customizable and extensible.

You can view the code here: https://github.com/khuedoan/homelab (the ./metal folder)

I'd have a look at https://www.talos.dev and https://www.sidero.dev/

If you're using ipxe to boot & install Talos on baremetal, I would also suggest you take a look at Sidero Metal.

I would take a serious look at Sidero and Talos, which are amazing projects that follow a similar philosophy to flatcar/coreos but they have their own approach as well. They use the cluster api to provision bare metal nodes over iPXE.