This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Hamdi KHELIL
Hey everyone 👋
If you have been following my posts, you might have noticed that I have been pretty quiet lately 😅
There is a good reason for that
I have been spending a lot of time building my own homelab a place where I can safely test, break, and rebuild complex infrastructures without worrying about cloud costs or production risks 🧑💻
My goal is simple
Create a production grade Kubernetes environment at home using Proxmox for virtualization and Kubespray for cluster provisioning 💡
This environment allows me to test real world scenarios and also experiment with features for my Kubermates project 🚀
Let me walk you through the why and the how
⚙️ The Motivation
As a DevOps and SRE engineer, Kubernetes is part of my daily life.
But testing new tools, scaling strategies, GitOps workflows, or security rules often requires:
✅ complete freedom
✅ zero fear of downtime
✅ repeatability
✅ controlled costs
A homelab gives me full control of the stack including: network, storage, virtualization, routing, DNS, automation and resilience strategies 💪
It rapidly became much more than a hobby. It is now my mini data center
🧩 Proxmox as the Foundation
To host everything, I chose Proxmox VE
Reasons behind this choice:
🖥️ clean and powerful web UI and CLI
⚙️ excellent virtualization and storage integration
🌐 flexible networking and clustering
🔁 snapshots and backup system made for tests and disasters
Each hypervisor node runs multiple virtual machines that will become control planes, workers or utility nodes like DNS and monitoring services
Proxmox gives me the freedom to rebuild everything as many times as needed
☁️ Kubernetes Deployment With Kubespray
Once the virtual machines were ready, I needed a repeatable approach to deploy Kubernetes.
I selected Kubespray because:
🔥 it is production proven
🧩 uses Ansible which makes automation easy
🔧 allows deep customization
🔄 supports highly available clusters
This lets me rebuild the entire cluster in minutes while keeping the configuration under version control
Perfect for experimentation
💪 Homelab Specs
Right now, my homelab is running with:
🧠 96 GB of RAM
⚡ 36 vCPUs
This gives enough headroom to simulate:
Autoscaling and performance constraints
Monitoring with Prometheus, Loki, Thanos etc
GitOps flows with Argo CD and Helmfile
Network isolation and multi tenancy
Production security patterns
Computing constraints actually make the optimization challenges even more interesting
🔬 A Playground for Kubermates
If you know me, you know I am working on Kubermates
This homelab is now my real life testing ground for the platform
Here I can:
✅ test onboarding flows and automation patterns
✅ simulate multi tenant setups
✅ validate best practices for deploy and operate
✅ try both cluster and application level policies
Everything is reproducible and controlled
Exactly what I need to test responsibly
🌐 Secure Remote Access With WireGuard VPN
Although everything runs at home, I still want to access the environment securely when I travel or work away from my desk
For this, I use WireGuard VPN running on a small gateway VM
Why WireGuard
🔒 strong encryption
⚡ ultra fast performance
🧩 minimal configuration
📱 clients for Linux, Mac, Windows, iOS and Android
My access architecture:
Only VPN traffic can reach the Proxmox cluster and Kubernetes nodes
No ports are exposed directly to the internet
Internal DNS and Ingress work exactly as inside the local network
So I get full access to Grafana, Argo CD, dashboards, kubectl and SSH
as if I was physically at home 🏠
This keeps everything private and secure
Perfect for a personal lab
🧠 Key Lessons Learned So Far
Building Kubernetes at home gives you a deeper understanding of what is behind the cloud curtain
Main takeaways
Networking is always trickier than expected 😅
Local DNS matters more than anyone admits
Good VM templates save hours of setup time
Resource constraints teach real FinOps awareness
Breaking things makes you learn faster
And the best part
It is incredibly fun
🚀 What Comes Next
This is just the beginning
Upcoming articles in the series
1️⃣ Proxmox hardware and virtualization best practices
2️⃣ Kubespray automation and cluster bootstrapping
3️⃣ DNS and networking architecture for homelabs
4️⃣ GitOps, certificates and observability stack deployment
5️⃣ How to simulate production workloads at home
The goal
Help anyone build a professional grade Kubernetes experience locally
without cloud billing surprises
Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more 🔥
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Hamdi KHELIL
Hamdi KHELIL | Sciencx (2025-10-26T20:10:21+00:00) 🏡 Why I Built My Own Homelab to Run Kubernetes. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/10/26/%f0%9f%8f%a1-why-i-built-my-own-homelab-to-run-kubernetes/
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