I run a hobbyist’s infrastructure out of my basement. I have a Raspberry Pi 3 (amy), a Raspberry Pi 2 (hermes), an old gaming rig (theprofessor), and a DigitalOcean droplet (zoidberg). Each of them has a purpose and they are each precious to me.
Managing them has been a pain lately so I’ve been working on reducing the pain. For starters, I’ve moved a lot of the boring configuration management over to Ansible. That has been a big help actually. Now I can use templates for the configuration files and keep everything up-to-date quickly and easily.
Another thing that I’ve done is install Tailscale on all of my servers and devices. That gave me a quick and easy way to connect from my laptop no matter where I am. Under the hood, it uses Wireguard so it’s secure and fast. Anecdotally, it was about a 10x speedup for me. I have gigabit fiber coming into my house and a gigabit LAN infrastructure. When I was running OpenVPN, the max connection speed through the VPN I could get was around 5 Mb/s. Now that I’ve switched over to Wireguard, I regularly see around 50 Mb/s. It was a nice improvement.
Each server in my infrastructure has a specific purpose. amy runs Home Assistant and the attendant services for it for local control of IoT devices. hermes runs Pi-hole for whole-house ad-blocking. zoidberg power this website and several others. And theprofessor is my NAS. Pretty much all of those services are running in Docker. To manage them, I’ve been my own container orchestration service. Last week, I read the post Running Nomad for home server and figured it was time to get a container orchestration system going.
I’ve tried running k3s on my infra before but on my severely-limited nodes, it would never seem to start properly or once started could never run another container. Nomad seemed promising though. I’m happy to report that I got it running in about an hour on all of my nodes except hermes and I suspect that’s due to the ridiculously old arm version that hermes has. I’m still working on migrating my services over to it but so far I’m enjoying using nomad as opposed to managing all the services myself.