202510041749 Simplifying The Homelab

I think the homelab is too complicated. There is an unnecessary way of managing various kinds of manifests and I think I am just making my life difficult using Tanka.

One of the big issues is that I’m finding it difficult to actually understand the abstractions I wrote a couple of months back. Perhaps it is memory loss or perhaps it was an unnecessary abstraction.

I think for this new revision of the homelab cluster, I call it V2.

Let’s approach it from this way

1. What is the plan to release applications? Do apps go first or infra related software (ie Secrets Operator?)
2. I should blog and document more often. I felt that was the reason I made this monorepo and that was one of the goals for this year. Let’s write out a plan and incrementally add the applications and plumbing in.
3. Focus on the core cluster essentials. What are the essentials and which is the most important?
   1. Flux
   2. Longhorn
   3. TailScale
   4. Secrets Operator
4. Remove unnecessary abstraction
   1. Tanka
   2. Helm

Managing a k8s homelab shouldn’t be made more complicated than it already is