Homelab Overview¶
This section documents the homelab environment — its purpose, architecture philosophy, and current state.
Purpose¶
The homelab serves as a personal infrastructure platform for:
- Running self-hosted services (media, monitoring, networking, storage)
- Testing configurations before recommending them to clients
- Demonstrating governance and documentation practices
- Cross-cloud integration with Azure and Oracle Cloud
Architecture Philosophy¶
- Everything is documented. If it's not in this doc site, it doesn't officially exist.
- Services are containerized. Docker + Compose is the default. Native installs require justification.
- Backups are verified. A backup that hasn't been tested is not a backup.
- Monitoring is always on. If a service goes down without an alert firing, that's a gap to fix.
Environment Summary¶
| Attribute | Value |
|---|---|
| Primary hypervisor | Proxmox VE (or bare metal Linux — update as applicable) |
| Container runtime | Docker + Docker Compose |
| Network segmentation | VLAN-based (see Networking) |
| Storage | NAS + local SSD (see Inventory) |
| Monitoring stack | Grafana + Prometheus + Node Exporter + cAdvisor |
| VPN | WireGuard (local) + Tailscale (remote access) |
| DNS | Pi-hole (primary) + upstream resolver |