Devops

For years I wanted a homelab at home. A place of my own to host development tools, monitor my machines, run home automation, and experiment without risking breaking anything important. The idea is simple. Getting it running, a bit less so. Back then, Kubernetes didn’t exist yet. Options for running multiple services on a single machine came down to bash scripting, hand-written Nginx configs, and a lot of coffee. Tutorials on “homelab for humans” were nowhere to be found. ...

When you run workloads on-premise, you can get away with almost no observability. You have SSH. You have top. You have someone who knows that the authentication service always spikes on Monday mornings. Institutional knowledge substitutes for instrumentation, and nobody budgets the time to replace it. Then you migrate to the cloud. The institutional knowledge doesn’t follow. The SSH access is gone or inconvenient. And for the first time, you’re staring at fourteen FrankenPHP containers with no idea what they’re actually doing. ...

The setup seemed perfect. Point *.traefik.me at 127.0.0.1, download a wildcard certificate from the same domain, drop it into Traefik, and every local service gets a clean HTTPS URL with no IP in the address bar. No Let’s Encrypt rate limits, no mkcert to explain to teammates, no self-signed warnings to click through. Just https://myapp.traefik.me and a green padlock. Then in March 2025, Let’s Encrypt revoked the certificate. The wildcard cert for traefik.me is gone and it’s not coming back. ...

I ran Vagrant for years. A Vagrantfile per project, a shared base box, a provision script that worked on Tuesday but not on Thursday. The promise was simple: reproducible environments for everyone on the team. The reality was more complicated. The Vagrant years The setup made sense at the time. One VM per project, provisioned with shell scripts or Ansible, shared via a versioned Vagrantfile. Onboarding was theoretically vagrant up and you’re done. ...