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Homelab as Production

Building a production-grade Kubernetes platform on a Proxmox homelab over 43 working sessions with Claude Code as the engineering co-pilot: GitOps, HA PostgreSQL, SSO, secrets management, CI/CD, observability, and every failure along the way.

  1. Series launch
    I Spent 2-3 Weeks Talking to AI Agents and Getting Nowhere. Then I Built a Production Platform in 2.5 Weeks.

    The story behind Homelab as Production — and what I actually learned about working with AI.

  2. Preface
    Preface: Before the Method

    Where this project started, and why the tools almost got in the way

  3. Part 1 of 16
    The Production Homelab Thesis

    Why apply enterprise patterns at home, and why AI makes it viable now

  4. Part 2 of 16
    Provisioning Hardware with Terraform and an AI That Made Mistakes

    The bpg/proxmox provider, cloud-init, PostgreSQL HA — and the SSH username bug

  5. Part 3 of 16
    GitOps from Day One: Bootstrapping FluxCD

    Why you set up GitOps before deploying any applications

  6. Part 4 of 16
    The Platform Layer Nobody Talks About

    MetalLB, ingress-nginx, cert-manager, NFS: the boring infrastructure every app depends on

  7. Part 5 of 16
    Observability Before Applications

    Why you instrument the cluster before deploying anything else

  8. Recap
    Five Posts In: The Foundation Arc

    What the first five posts of Homelab as Production are actually about

  9. Part 6 of 16
    SSO for Everything: Keycloak and OAuth2 Proxy

    Centralizing authentication before you have more than two apps

  10. Part 7 of 16
    Secrets Without Secrets: 1Password Connect and External Secrets Operator

    Never commit a secret. Ever. The production secrets pattern at homelab scale.

  11. Part 8 of 16
    The Application Deployment Pattern

    A repeatable 7-manifest pattern (plus kustomization.yaml) that scales to 20+ applications

  12. Part 9 of 16
    Nexus — Building Your Own Software Supply Chain

    Why your homelab needs a repository manager, and how to build one

  13. Part 10 of 16
    Day-2 Operations — HA, Backup, and Rolling Upgrades

    The unglamorous work that makes infrastructure actually reliable

  14. Recap
    Posts 6-10: The Trustworthy Arc

    What the second five posts of Homelab as Production are actually about

  15. Part 11 of 16
    CI/CD — Validating Infrastructure as Code

    Every PR goes through a pipeline. Here's what that pipeline checks.

  16. Part 12 of 16
    GitLab on Kubernetes — 10 PRs to Make It Work

    Self-hosted GitLab with Keycloak OIDC, homelab CA TLS, and a K8s runner — and the PR review that caught the mistakes

  17. Part 13 of 16
    Three Sessions to Fix OIDC SSO — A Debugging Arc

    How a 'simple' SSO integration turned into a JVM truststore, CORS, and a Jetty runtime discovery

  18. Part 14 of 16
    What Claude Got Wrong (And Right)

    An honest retrospective on 43 sessions of AI-assisted infrastructure work

  19. Part 15 of 16
    AI-Assisted Infrastructure for Your Team

    Translating the homelab methodology to an engineering innovation team

  20. Part 15 companion
    Executive Summary: AI-Assisted Infrastructure Engineering

    A methodology for applying AI assistance safely in engineering teams

  21. Part 16 of 16
    Lessons Learned and Future Work

    What 43 sessions taught me, and what comes next

  22. Recap
    Posts 11-16: The Hard Parts, and What They Revealed

    What the final six posts of Homelab as Production are actually about

  23. Bonus
    The GPU Passthrough That Wasn't: A Hardware Limitation Story

    Sometimes the right answer is that the answer doesn't exist

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