This project is an internal cloud that is scaled enough to meet the demands of a single pleb like me.
Goals of this project
- Learn how to use industry-standard DevOps tools
- Try to adhere to Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
- Give these old devices an actual use
Technology Stack
End-User Services, planned and completed
| Name | Status | Deployed on | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| OctoPrint | Deployed | Bare Metal | 3D Printer sender with web UI |
| Firefly III | Deployed | k3s | Budgeting App |
| Printer Image Snapper | Deployed | k3s | Periodically takes pictures of my 3D Printer and uploads them to the internet |
| DokuWiki, D&D | Deployed | Docker Compose | A wiki for worldbuilding my D&D campaign |
| Trilium Notes | Deployed | k3s | Personal wiki/note-taking for school and more |
| Apache Spark | Planned | k3s | Big Data processing engine |
| Jupyter Notebook | Planned | k3s | Interactive code notebooks |
| Bookstack | Planned | k3s | “Internal” wiki for documenting this thing |
| ELabFTW | Planned | k3s | Lab notes |
| NextCloud | Planned | k3s | Personal cloud |
Infrastructure Services
| Name | Description | Deployed on |
|---|---|---|
| Proxmox | An open-source Type 1 Hypervisor OS | Bare metal |
| K3s | A lightweight Kubernetes distribution that won’t eat up most of the resources on a Raspberry Pi or craptop | VM |
| MySQL/MariaDB | Database | LXC |
| Postgres | Database | LXC |
| Docker Compose | Multi-container applications stack, useful for servers dedicated to a single purpose | Bare metal |
| NFS | File storage | LXC |
Hardware
Flexible Home Resources
These resources share a variety of workloads.
| Name | Model | Arch | Processor | Cores | RAM (GB) | Role |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| crappertopfn-1 | Acer Aspire E1-510 | amd64 | Pentium N3520 | 4 | 4 | Proxmox: k3s, nfs |
| cracktopfn-2 | HP Pavilion x360 13 | amd64 | i5-2520M | 4 | 8 | Proxmox: k3s |
| thonkpadfn-3 | Thinkpad T420 | amd64 | i5-6200U | 4 | 8 | Proxmox: k3s, db, nfs |
| zerg-1fn-4 | Raspberry Pi 3B+ | arm | BCM2837B0 | 4 | 1 | k3s |
| zerg-2fn-4 | Raspberry Pi 3B | arm | BCM2837 | 4 | 1 | k3s |
| zerg-3fn-4 | Raspberry Pi 2B+ | arm | BCM2836 | 4 | 1 | k3s |
| zerg-4fn-4 | Orange Pi One | arm | sun8iw7p1 | 4 | 0.5 | k3s |
| Total | --- | --- | --- | 28 | 23.5 | Wasting my Time |
Here’s what it all looks like.
Turnkey Home Resources
These resources are dedicated to one purpose and one purpose only.
| Name | Model | Role |
|---|---|---|
| octopi | Raspberry Pi 2B+ | OctoPrint |
| BANANA | Lenovo Legion Y530 | Personal Computer: development, work, and gaming |
External Cloud Resources
Unfortunately, my internet connection is slow, so anything I want others to be able to use has to be hosted on an external cloud.
| Name | Provider | Price ($/mo) | Arch | Processor | Cores | RAM (GB) | Role |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| contabo | Contabo | 7.90 | amd64 | Xeon something | 4 | 8 | Docker Compose |
| oci-1 | Oracle | 0 | amd64 | Xeon something | 1 | 1 | Docker Compose |
| oci-2 | Oracle | 0 | amd64 | Xeon something | 1 | 1 | Docker Compose |
| Total | --- | 7.90 | --- | --- | 6 | 8 | Wasting my Time |
Monitoring Services
| Name | Type | Description | Deployed on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fluent-bit | Logs | Reads logs from each node’s containers | k3s, Docker Compose |
| Fluentd | Logs | Centrally parses and processes logs | k3s |
| Loki | Logs | Stores and indexes logs | k3s |
| Prometheus | Metrics | Stores and indexes logs | k3s |
| Loki | Visualization | Stores and indexes logs | k3s |
Management Utilities
- Ansible — Declaratively configuring servers
- Terraform — Declaratively provisioning resources
Things I no longer use
- ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, Filebeat, Metricbeat) — This eats up a ridiculous amount of resources. As in, 6 GB (after attempts to minimize it) just dedicated to logging on a 28 GB cluster.
- Zerg rushing is essentially the “quantity-over-quality” tactic in strategy games: you send many expendable units against the enemy to hopefully overwhelm them.↩
- :thinking: https://emoji.gg/assets/emoji/thonk.png↩
- This is my old laptop. I pulled it out of my backpack one day and saw the screen completely cracked for no good reason whatsoever.↩
- My mom complained about it being really slow, and even with Linux, it’s still slow. Thus, it’s worse than crap.↩
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