202501111134 A Portable Homelab

After outlining my goals for my homelab 202412271311 Homelab Redesign 2025, I realised that rambling and reflection was was more a physical design of how the homelab infrastructure should look like.

So naturally I thought - wouldn’t it be ideal if the homelab application state could be idempotent? Wouldn’t it also be awesome if I could redeploy my homelab as easy as having smaller, decentralised and portable nodes for compute?

Ideally, the management of the applications could live in the homelab should live through Kubernetes. Managing a homelab through Kubernetes might seem like a lot of additional overhead but I see some benefits.

Firstly, introducing Kubernetes as a homelab will not only be a nourishing learning experience but also a career boost to separate myself from other software engineers.

However, before I can even think about provisioning and deploying a kubernetes cluster, I decided to take a few steps back: how can I automate the provisioning of multiple configurations?

A Solid Foundation: Ansible

The first step above is to configure a simple Ansible Playbook workflow which would create a stable base to achieve a rapid, re-deployable and ideally idemptotent deployments across nodes.

Furthermore, I get to learn how to use it to automate many other linux-related tasks. Currently these tasks are long-lived in my head therefore I am the automation. I would like to capture it as reproducible code.

I’ve never worked with Ansible before and I believe it would be a good opportunity for me to learn about it. At the same time, managing my virtual machines and linux containers which were provisioned by Proxmox became a chore.

For context, I was based and working remotely late last year in Japan. I asked myself what would it take to bring my homelab with me to Japan if I were to ever re-locate. Beyond my concerns of the homelab as a monolithic physical and application deployment, it occured to me that the homelab itself was not idempotent and definitely not portable.

Similarly, I had to work on a project that necessitated the provisioning, deployment and management of a group (or cluster) of Raspberry Pi’s for an on-site art installation. There was a large overhead of constantly provisioning the correct resources and managing the correct configuration of these Pis. I knew Ansible was a solution to my pains and sorrows but due to time constraints – learning how to use it wasn’t a priority.

I wondered what it could take to achieve an idempotent homelab environment in the event I had to redeploy it again. I don’t believe Ansible or automation is a ultimate solution here – rather, I believe that if there can be a way to reach that goal; my homelab can be deployed anytime and anywhere.

Therefore, I wanted to enforce the concept of a portable homelab that can control its own environment and application state without direct manual intervention.

However, a portable homelab is only portable if I can remember the instructions. So that is the reason why I made this documentation site 😀.