Homelab 2.0: Building a Soft Nest for Your Applications

Speaker: Stephan Burns

Room: CC 203

Time: Sat 9:30 am – 10:00 am

Format: Lecture (30 Min + Q&A)

Difficulty: Some experience required

Track: Self-Hosting

Presenter Location: In-person

Experience: first time speaking

Description:

My homelab began with a chat server for my robotics team running on a Raspberry Pi. Over time, it grew to over a dozen services, moved hardware multiple times, and became hard to manage and maintain. I had tried several times to use automation tools like Ansible to assist me, but they never stuck. One day, I decided I had had enough and started to design a new architecture from the ground up to solve the many problems I was facing.

Attendees will learn how to create a fully reproducible environment using Golden Images, Terraform, Ansible, and the key to it all, the Disposable Architecture that prevents configuration drift. To achieve the following goals:

Maintaining and updating services should be quick and easy. Ideally, done from a phone in my spare time.

Fully reproducible. The environment should be set up with nothing but git repositories.

0 config drift. For IaC tools like Ansible to work, config drift cannot happen.

Automate the boring stuff as much as possible. Things like DNS entries, backups, SSL certs, etc. should be automated.

Target Audience:

Self-hosters