My Home Operations Repository

... managed with Flux, Renovate, and GitHub Actions 🤖

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📖 Overview

This is a mono repository for my home infrastructure and Kubernetes cluster. I try to adhere to Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and GitOps practices using tools like Ansible, Terraform, Kubernetes, Flux, Renovate, and GitHub Actions.

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⛵ Kubernetes

This is based on the structure of the template over at onedr0p/flux-cluster-template.

Installation

My cluster is k3s provisioned overtop bare-metal Debian using the Ansible galaxy role ansible-role-k3s. This is a semi-hyper-converged cluster, workloads and block storage are sharing the same available resources on my nodes while I have a separate server for (NFS) file storage.

🔸 Click here to see my Ansible playbooks and roles.

Core Components

• cilium: internal Kubernetes networking plugin
• cert-manager: creates SSL certificates for services in my cluster
• external-dns: automatically syncs DNS records from my cluster ingresses to a DNS provider
• ingress-nginx: ingress controller for Kubernetes
• longhorn: distributed block storage for persistent storage
• sops: managed secrets for Kubernetes, Ansible, and Terraform which are committed to Git

GitOps

Flux watches my kubernetes folder (see Directories below) and makes the changes to my cluster based on the YAML manifests.

The way Flux works for me here is it will recursively search the kubernetes/main/apps folder until it finds the most top level kustomization.yaml per directory and then apply all the resources listed in it. That aforementioned kustomization.yaml will generally only have a namespace resource and one or many Flux kustomizations. Those Flux kustomizations will generally have a HelmRelease or other resources related to the application underneath it which will be applied.

Renovate watches my entire repository looking for dependency updates, when they are found a PR is automatically created. When some PRs are merged Flux applies the changes to my cluster.

Directories

This Git repository contains the following directories under Kubernetes.

📁 kubernetes
├── 📁 main            # main cluster
│   ├── 📁 apps           # applications
│   ├── 📁 bootstrap      # bootstrap procedures
│   ├── 📁 flux           # core flux configuration
│   └── 📁 templates      # re-useable components
└── 📁 nas             # nas cluster
    ├── 📁 apps           # applications
    ├── 📁 bootstrap      # bootstrap procedures
    └── 📁 flux           # core flux configuration

Cluster Layout

Below is a high-level look at the layout of how my directory structure with Flux works. In this brief example, you are able to see that authelia will not be able to run until lldap and cloudnative-pg are running. It also shows that the Cluster custom resource depends on the cloudnative-pg Helm chart. This is needed because cloudnative-pg installs the Cluster custom resource definition in the Helm chart.

# Key: <kind> :: <metadata.name>
GitRepository :: home-kubernetes
    Kustomization :: cluster
        Kustomization :: cluster-apps
            Kustomization :: cloudnative-pg
                HelmRelease :: cloudnative-pg
            Kustomization :: cloudnative-pg-cluster
                DependsOn:
                    Kustomization :: cloudnative-pg
                Cluster :: postgres
            Kustomization :: lldap
                HelmRelease :: lldap
                DependsOn:
                    Kustomization :: cloudnative-pg-cluster
            Kustomization :: authelia
                DependsOn:
                    Kustomization :: lldap
                    Kustomization :: cloudnative-pg-cluster
                HelmRelease :: authelia

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🌐 DNS

Home DNS

I have a Orange Pi Zero SBC with pihole and unbound deployed as containers. In my cluster external-dns is deployed with the pihole provider which syncs DNS records to pihole.

Public DNS

Outside the external-dns instance mentioned above another instance is deployed in my cluster and configured to sync DNS records to Cloudflare. The only ingress this external-dns instance looks at to gather DNS records to put in Cloudflare are ones that have an ingress class name of external and an ingress annotation of external-dns.alpha.kubernetes.io/target.

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🔧 Hardware

Device	Count	OS Disk Size	Data Disk Size	Ram	Operating System	Purpose
Intel NUC11i3	1	512GB NVMe		40GB	Debian	Kubernetes Master
Morefine M9	1	512GB NVMe		16GB	Debian	Kubernetes Master
Gigabyte Brix 7100	1	512GB NVMe		24GB	Debian	Kubernetes Master
Node 304 + Ryzen 5600G	1	128GB SSD	2x16TB+2x8TB ZFS & 2TB SSD	32GB	NixOS	NAS

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