06-23, 13:40–13:45 (Europe/Amsterdam), Grote Zaal
Back in 2021, as my work & personal laptop was giving up on me and the prospects of going back to the office were nowhere to be seen, I decided to built a desktop for about the same budget that a top-of-the-line work laptop would get me. I ended up with a mean development machine that I could also game on.
Three doritos later my PC has become instrumental in regaining control over my data.
The server is provisioned with Ansible; runs containers with Nomad; service discovery is with Consul; secrets are stored in Vault; Load balancing and certificate management is done with Caddy.
A few of the services that I run in the server for my family and me are:
- Nextcloud
- Pihole
- Plex
- Home Assistant
- Vaultwarden
- n8n
- MonicaHQ
- Photoprism
And a lot more!
Most of these services are backed by PostgreSQL, my favorite database server.
The storage layer is a combination of a RADI1 2x 4TB HDD with ZFS and 1x 1TB NVMe SSD for running the OS, storing service configurations and caching as well.
This is a story on how a home lab slowly but steadily not only became the backbone my home entertainment but also my source of joy and learning.
Carlos is an automation junkie. A nerd and a hobbyist at heart.
He wrote his first website when he was 6 years old on his uncle's computer using Office Word.
Since then, his passion for computers hasn't stopped.
When he's not busy helping customers with cloud migration projects or automation challenges or speaking at conferences, he's somewhere in the mountains paragliding.
He values open communication, clean code, emotional maturity and nerd talk.