Why I Did It
At first, this was a learning project. I wanted to understand the real nuts and bolts of Kubernetes — not just on paper, but on actual, bare-metal hardware in my home.
But over time, it became something more. It became my platform — the place where I host the things I care about, where I experiment, where I break things and fix them again.
What I Wanted
- To learn how things really work under the hood
- To automate everything — no clicking, no guesswork
- To host my own services with security and flexibility in mind
- To power things down when I don’t need them, and boot them up instantly when I do
What I Built
The stack is simple but powerful:
- K3s – The lightweight Kubernetes friend of Raspeberry Pi
- Terraform – To define and control everything, from Helm charts to secrets
- Ansible – To configure and prepare the nodes exactly how I want them
- Helm – For reproducible, flexible application installs
- Argo CD – My GitOps engine: if it’s not in Git, it doesn’t exist
The Digital Farm
Yes, I named the nodes after farm animals.
Because why not? This is my playground.
- 🐮 cow – Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB RAM) – the control-plane
- 🐑 sheep – Raspberry Pi 5 (16GB RAM) – general-purpose worker
- 🦆 duck – Lenovo M910q (i7, 32GB RAM) – my AI muscle, mostly asleep until needed
They live on my MikroTik-based home network, which I also manage with Terraform.
You can read about my networking automation journey in this blog post.
On Power, Silence & Grace
One of the most satisfying parts of this cluster is its graceful shutdown and startup workflow.
When I don’t need it, I power it down — safely:
- Scale down all Longhorn workloads
- Drain the nodes
- Stop k3s
- Power off
When I bring it back up, a systemd service uncordons the nodes, and Argo CD takes care of the rest.
No corrupted volumes. No drama.
What’s Coming
This post is just an overview. In the coming weeks, I’ll publish deeper dives into how I configured specific workloads and the challenges I faced.
If I’ve sparked your interest in self-hosting, automation, or building cool things, feel free to explore the full project on GitHub — everything is fully declarative, version-controlled.