Some background

It's amazing what all the services on the internet can do. But what if, just what if, you can do it yourself?

As a Operations Engineer in a tech company, it's easy to be ambicious on what you could achieve. But it's not always easy trying to make changes on company infrastructure, so this is where homelab comes in.

Considerations

We want the homelab to closely resemble a production environment, but at the same time keep the Hardware requirement and set up as simple as possible. There are a few things to consider

Functionality requirements

• Accessibility from internet

• Load Balancing

• Local domain names

• Kubernetes / DB / Standalone App Servers

Simplicity requirements

• Minimum hardware requirement

• Use existing home broadband

• No change to existing home network

Result

The end result of the system architecture:

• Single Physical host HyperVisor (VMWare)

  • Advantages

    • Small footprint

    • No need for dedicated network equipment (operate with vSwitch/soft router only)

    • Can use consumer grade (even 2nd hand) equipments

  • Disadvantages

    • Need to take entire infrastructure offline for maintainance

    • Single point of failure

    • Not able to replicate failover (can simulated with VMs)

• Soft router gateway on VM (PFSense)

  • Advantages

    • Segregated LAN via vSwitch

    • Load Balancing capability

    • DNS resolver

  • Disadvantages

    • Need to be booted before all other VM for other VMs to have a gateway

• Tunnel to VPS as internet incoming traffic Gateway 

  • Advantages

    • Public IP accessible from Internet (CGNAT penetrating)

    • additional Transport/Networking layer firewall capability

    • Hide home IP address from internet

  • Disadvantages

    • Bandwidth costs money

    • Additional latency

    • Additional computational cost

  • Note, alternatively we can use Cloudflare tunnel with cloudflared as proxy. This is a more mature solution with easier setup, however is more limited if you want to perform some edge operations

Some other possible systems