Welcome to my Kubernetes Homelab
Hello and welcome to my first blog post!
I wanted to start by introducing my setup and sharing a bit about my goals with my homelab in this inaugural post. If you’d like to know more about me, feel free to check out the About Me page before continuing.
Why Did I Decide to Start a Homelab?
Ever heard of tutorial hell? Yeah, I’ve been there—plenty of times. A major issue I noticed in my learning journey was that I was always stuck in cycles of taking video courses, preparing for certifications, or reading textbooks (looking at you, Python). While I gained a lot of theoretical knowledge, I lacked hands-on, practical experience.
The solution? Start a homelab.
I’d been tinkering with my AWS dashboard and simulating production enterprise environments, but as you might guess, that can get expensive quickly. Setting up a homelab was the natural, cost-effective next step for me.
Why Kubernetes?
Kubernetes is a major focus for me for several reasons:
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Enterprise Adoption: Kubernetes is widely used in enterprise environments for good reason—it enables large-scale containerization and simplifies application management at scale.
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Hands-On Opportunity: At work, I primarily support the existing CI/CD pipeline and don’t often get to build or manage applications from the ground up. Learning Kubernetes gives me the chance to fill that gap in my skill set.
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Career Advancement: From my research, mastering Kubernetes at a high level is a valuable skill that can open doors to senior-level DevOps roles.
What’s to Come?
This is just the beginning of my homelab journey. Setting up this website was a big milestone and a great introduction to documenting my progress.
Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing more posts about my goals, the challenges I face, and the projects I’m working on.
Hardware
Currently, my setup consists of one piece of hardware that functions as both my master node and worker node, running k3s. I’ll dive deeper into the specifics of my setup and k3s in a future post, but here’s a quick overview of my hardware:
- HP EliteDesk G3 Mini
- 64GB RAM
- 1TB SSD
Starting a homelab doesn’t need to be expensive, and repurposing old hardware is an excellent way to get started. I plan to expand my setup in the future with more mini PCs, ThinkPads, and maybe even Raspberry Pis.