Homelab

My K3s cluster runs on six Intel NUCs. They’re great for the 50+ containers that make up my homelab — Plex, Home Assistant, Frigate, Paperless, the usual suspects. But they’re terrible at machine learning. Four Skylake cores and 32 GB of RAM per node doesn’t get you far when Immich wants to classify 80,000 photos or Frigate wants a vision model to describe who’s at your door. The Mac Studio sitting under my desk — M1 Ultra, 64 GB unified memory — is the opposite problem. Absurd single-machine ML performance, but I don’t want to migrate my entire cluster to it. I want the K8s cluster to stay the control plane for routing, TLS, service discovery, and GitOps, while the Mac handles the heavy compute. ...

My Bird Buddy smart feeder takes a photo every time a bird visits. Over a few months, that adds up to thousands of images — all sitting in Bird Buddy’s cloud app with no good way to search, organize, or back them up. I wanted them in Immich, my self-hosted photo library, organized by species and properly timestamped. The Bird Buddy app doesn’t have an export feature. But the pybirdbuddy Python library can authenticate to their API and walk the feed. So I built a two-stage pipeline: a CronJob that downloads new photos daily, and a second CronJob that syncs them into Immich. Both run in Kubernetes, and the whole thing is about 300 lines of Python. ...

Home automations are code that controls physical things. When they break, the consequences aren’t a 500 error — they’re a garage door that won’t close in a snowstorm, or window shades that open at 3 AM, or a tablet that charges to 100% and stays plugged in for months until the battery swells. I run about 20 AppDaemon automations in my homelab, all deployed as Kubernetes ConfigMaps and tested with appdaemontestframework. The testing isn’t academic — it’s caught real bugs that would have been annoying or expensive to discover in production. ...

Managing DNS records for a homelab with dozens of services is tedious. Every time you deploy something new, you have to remember to add a DNS record. I solved this by using external-dns to automatically create Pi-hole DNS entries from Kubernetes ingress resources. The Goal When I create an ingress like this: apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1 kind: Ingress metadata: name: frigate annotations: external-dns.alpha.kubernetes.io/hostname: frigate.bowerha.us spec: rules: - host: frigate.bowerha.us # ... I want Pi-hole to automatically create a DNS record pointing frigate.bowerha.us to my ingress controller’s IP. No manual steps, no forgetting to update DNS. ...

One of the challenges of running a homelab with dozens of services is keeping track of what’s running and where. I recently deployed Homepage - a modern, fully static dashboard that automatically discovers services from Kubernetes ingresses. Why Homepage? I evaluated several dashboard options including Homarr and Heimdall. Homepage stood out for a few reasons: Kubernetes-native service discovery - no manual configuration needed Real-time pod status - shows if services are actually running Clean, modern UI - dark theme, customizable layout Lightweight - just a static site with no database The Setup Homepage runs as a simple deployment in Kubernetes with a ServiceAccount that has read access to the cluster. The magic happens through ingress annotations. ...

I manage two Kubernetes environments - a home cluster (bowerhaus) and a cloud cluster (rustycloud) - using GitOps with Kustomize and ArgoCD. After running this setup for a while, I’ve learned what works, what doesn’t, and some non-obvious gotchas. The Architecture kustomize/ ├── base/ # Shared, environment-agnostic configs │ ├── media/ │ │ ├── lidarr/ │ │ ├── radarr/ │ │ └── sonarr/ │ ├── home-automation/ │ │ ├── home-assistant/ │ │ └── frigate/ │ └── data-analytics/ │ ├── prometheus/ │ └── grafana/ ├── environments/ │ ├── bowerhaus/ │ │ ├── applicationsets/ # ArgoCD ApplicationSet │ │ └── apps/ # Per-app overlays │ │ ├── frigate/ │ │ ├── home-assistant/ │ │ └── prometheus/ │ └── rustycloud/ │ ├── applicationsets/ │ └── apps/ │ ├── plex/ │ ├── sonarr/ │ └── grafana/ The key principle: base contains environment-agnostic resources, environments contain overlays that customize for each cluster. ...