• 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

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