My home operations repository

... managed with Flux, Renovate and GitHub Actions 🤖

This is a mono repository for my home infrastructure and Kubernetes cluster. I try to adhere to Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and GitOps practices using the tools like Ansible, Terraform, Kubernetes, Flux, Renovate and GitHub Actions.

There is a template over at onedr0p/flux-cluster-template if you wanted to try and follow along with some of the practices I use here.

My cluster is k3s provisioned overtop bare-metal Debian using the Ansible galaxy role ansible-role-k3s. This is a semi hyper-converged cluster, workloads and block storage are sharing the same available resources on my nodes while I have a separate server for (NFS) file storage.

🔸 Click here to see my Ansible playbooks and roles.

• actions-runner-controller: self-hosted Github runners
• cilium: internal Kubernetes networking plugin
• cert-manager: creates SSL certificates for services in my cluster
• external-dns: automatically syncs DNS records from my cluster ingresses to a DNS provider
• external-secrets: managed Kubernetes secrets using 1Password Connect.
• ingress-nginx: ingress controller for Kubernetes using NGINX as a reverse proxy and load balancer
• rook: distributed block storage for peristent storage
• sops: managed secrets for Kubernetes, Ansible and Terraform which are commited to Git
• tf-controller: additional Flux component used to run Terraform from within a Kubernetes cluster.
• volsync and snapscheduler: backup and recovery of persistent volume claims

Flux watches my kubernetes folder (see Directories below) and makes the changes to my cluster based on the YAML manifests.

The way Flux works for me here is it will recursively search the kubernetes/apps folder until it finds the most top level kustomization.yaml per directory and then apply all the resources listed in it. That aforementioned kustomization.yaml will generally only have a namespace resource and one or many Flux kustomizations. Those Flux kustomizations will generally have a HelmRelease or other resources related to the application underneath it which will be applied.

Renovate watches my entire repository looking for dependency updates, when they are found a PR is automatically created. When some PRs are merged Flux applies the changes to my cluster.

This Git repository contains the following directories under kubernetes.

📁 kubernetes      # Kubernetes cluster defined as code
├─📁 bootstrap     # Flux installation
├─📁 flux          # Main Flux configuration of repository
└─📁 apps          # Apps deployed into my cluster grouped by namespace (see below)

Below is a a high level look at the layout of how my directory structure with Flux works. In this brief example you are able to see that authelia will not be able to run until lldap and cloudnative-pg are running. It also shows that the Cluster custom resource depends on the cloudnative-pg Helm chart. This is needed because cloudnative-pg installs the Cluster custom resource definition in the Helm chart.

# Key: <kind> :: <metadata.name>
GitRepository :: home-kubernetes
    Kustomization :: cluster
        Kustomization :: cluster-apps
            Kustomization :: cluster-apps-cloudnative-pg
                HelmRelease :: cloudnative-pg
            Kustomization :: cluster-apps-cloudnative-pg-cluster
                DependsOn:
                    Kustomization :: cluster-apps-cloudnative-pg
                Cluster :: postgres
            Kustomization :: cluster-apps-lldap
                HelmRelease :: lldap
                DependsOn:
                    Kustomization :: cluster-apps-cloudnative-pg-cluster
            Kustomization :: cluster-apps-authelia
                DependsOn:
                    Kustomization :: cluster-apps-lldap
                    Kustomization :: cluster-apps-cloudnative-pg-cluster
                HelmRelease :: authelia

Click to see a high level network diagram

While most of my infrastructure and workloads are selfhosted I do rely upon the cloud for certain key parts of my setup. This saves me from having to worry about two things. (1) Dealing with chicken/egg scenarios and (2) services I critically need whether my cluster is online or not.

The alternative solution to these two problems would be to host a Kubernetes cluster in the cloud and deploy applications like HCVault, Vaultwarden, ntfy, and Gatus. However, maintaining another cluster and monitoring another group of workloads is a lot more time and effort than I am willing to put in.

On my Vyos router I have Bind9 and dnsdist deployed as containers. In my cluster external-dns is deployed with the RFC2136 provider which syncs DNS records to bind9.

Downstream DNS servers configured in dnsdist such as bind9 (above) and NextDNS. All my clients use dnsdist as the upstream DNS server, this allows for more granularity with configuring DNS across my networks. These could be things like giving each of my VLANs a specific nextdns profile, or having all requests for my domain forward to bind9 on certain networks, or only using 1.1.1.1 instead of nextdns on certain networks where adblocking isn't needed.

Outside the external-dns instance mentioned above another instance is deployed in my cluster and configure to sync DNS records to Cloudflare. The only ingresses this external-dns instance looks at to gather DNS records to put in Cloudflare are ones that have an ingress class name of external and an ingress annotation of external-dns.alpha.kubernetes.io/target.

Click to see da rack!

Thanks to all the people who donate their time to the Kubernetes @Home Discord community. A lot of inspiration for my cluster comes from the people that have shared their clusters using the k8s-at-home GitHub topic. Be sure to check out the Kubernetes @Home search for ideas on how to deploy applications or get ideas on what you can deploy.

See my awful commit history

See LICENSE