Craig Weber

Kubernetes + Raspberry Pi Homelab: Introduction

As I alluded to in my last post, I've finally decided to pull the trigger and build my own homelab: a personal computing environment for playing around with new tools and approaches for developing or operating software, including software that is personally useful.

For my homelab, I want to build a Raspberry Pi Kubernetes cluster for hosting my own applications and experimenting with different tools and approaches for operating software. However, bare metal (i.e., not running on a public cloud provider, such as AWS) is a second-class citizen for Kubernetes, so one must bring their own providers for storage, networking, load balancing, ingress (roughly "HTTP/layer-7 routing"), and much more.

One day, I have no doubt that there will be Kubernetes distributions targeting bare metal which are mature, robust, and open source; in the meanwhile, this series will document my efforts to work around those limitations so that others can build their own personal cloud platform more easily (or at least know what they're considering getting into!).

Next time, I'll delve into the hardware I'm using for my cluster.