Traditional first post

Harry Wells

— 1 min read
Traditional first post

Hi all,

I have been working as a Systems/DevOps/Platform Engineer for coming up to 2 years now and have always wanted to have a place to share testing new, emerging technologies or generally messing around with things.

Previously, I have made use of virtual machines, docker desktop and other smaller scale local development tools. But I finally caved and decided to home-lab my own cluster using a managed D-Link Switch and 3 Dell Optiplex Nodes running Ubuntu Server 26.04. I look forward to posting more often on here but I will outline my current cluster setup below:

Infrastructure / Cluster

  • 3× Ubuntu Server 26 nodes (node1 master, node2/node3 workers)
  • RKE2 as my Kubernetes distro
  • Canal CNI (Flannel + Calico)
  • local-path-provisioner — default StorageClass (single-node local volumes, no replication) didn't want to use Longhorn or Ceph even though I have experience due to configuration and resourcing

Networking / Ingress

  • kube-vip floating VIP via ARP, replacing MetalLB (for now...)
  • ingress-nginx (RKE2-bundled)
  • Tailscale mesh VPN across dev PC + all 3 nodes, plus subnet route to the VIP

TLS / Certificates

  • cert-manager — self-signed internal CA issuing per-app certs for hostnames

Monitoring

  • kube-prometheus-stack (Helm) — Prometheus + Grafana, exposed via ingress

GitOps / CI-CD

  • ArgoCD for GitOps continuous delivery
  • GitHub Actions as the planned CI (build/push images → update manifests repo)
  • Sealed Secrets encrypts secrets for safe git storage (used for the Cloudflare tunnel token)

Automation

  • Ansible to do IaC codifies the full RKE2 + addons bootstrap (deploy.sh + roles), run from node1 post manual networking setup

Other Tooling

  • k9s / kubeseal / ArgoCD CLI — installed on dev PC

And more excitingly a Public Blog Stack

  • Ghost an open source content management system w/ built-in auth
  • MySQL Ghost's database which is PVC-backed
  • cloudflared as a Cloudflare Tunnel connector
  • Cloudflare (DNS, WAF, DDoS protection, Zero Trust Access)
  • The Domain (obviously): harry-wells-infrastructure.com

Thanks for reading and I hope you stick around for the journey!