Homelab Server

My personal homelab running on a compact Lenovo ThinkCentre M series tiny desktop. This server handles all my development work through VSCode remote sessions and hosts various containerized services and websites.

Description

• Development Environment: Primary coding and development server I use, accessed via VSCode remote
• Container Orchestration: Full Kubernetes cluster managed with Rancher
• Service Hosting: I used to pay a fortune for digital ocean / aws VPS’s. Now I can run multiple websites and applications as containerized services for free.
• Low Power and Compact: Takes up barely any space and uses very little power.
• Always-On Infrastructure: As long as my home fibre doesn’t go down, the server is always on.

Tech

• Hardware: Lenovo ThinkCentre M series tiny desktop
• Container Platform: Kubernetes for container orchestration and management
• Management UI: Rancher for simplified Kubernetes cluster management
• Package Manager: Helm for deploying and managing Kubernetes applications
• Development: VSCode Remote for seamless remote development experience
• Network Security: Cloudflare with cloudflared tunnels for secure endpoint access
• Access Control: Cloudflare Zero Trust for identity-based security
• Architecture: Everything containerized for consistency and easy deployment

Features

• Remote Development: Full VSCode development environment accessible from anywhere
• Container-First: All services and applications run as containers for isolation and portability
• Kubernetes Native: Production-grade orchestration for personal projects and services
• Rancher Management: Web-based UI for easy cluster management and monitoring
• Helm Deployments: Standardized application deployments with version control
• Multi-Service Hosting: Running various websites and applications simultaneously
• Secure Access: Cloudflare tunnels eliminate need for port forwarding while protecting all endpoints
• Zero Trust Security: Identity-based access control ensuring only authorized users can reach services

Outcome and Future Improvements

The homelab has become an essential part of my development workflow, providing a central, consistent and powerful environment for all my projects that I can access from anywhere in the world. The containerized approach makes it easy to experiment with new technologies and deploy services reliably.

Future improvements could include:

• Move more stuff to IaC
  • I tend to be lazy and just manually deploy stuff via the rancher UI, then update via github actions.
• Backups
  • 🙈 Most stuff is backed up on git, but I should probably have a proper backup solution.