homelab

Introducing My Homelab Series

T.J. Tarazevits

T.J. Tarazevits

— 1 min read
A cluster of Raspberry Pis sitting on a desk with a laptop and monitor running monitoring software.
ChatGPT thinks I have a lot more hardware than I actually have :)

Hello and welcome to my engineering blog. My name is T.J. Tarazevits and I am diving into the world of homelabs. This multi-part series will follow my journey in setting up my own homelab. For context, I am a software engineer that has worked on front-end and back-end systems in large corporate environments. Infrastructure has usually being highly managed (AWS/Heroku/MongoDB Atlas) or a dedicated team of engineers has handled the complexities of Terraform and Kubernetes for the application developers.

My goals for this project are

  • Dive into the world of Devops to learn about how these tools work and to better understand the concepts I deal with in an abstracted way.
  • Create a "rent-free" environment to deploy my various side projects.
  • Deal with infrastructure at a scale more relevant to my day-to-day work versus using managed services like Vercel and Supabase that abstract away a lot of the complexity.

With that being said, I have started setting up my homelab cluster and will be breaking this out into various parts

Homelab Part 1: Setting up the Hardware
Setting up a Raspberry Pi compute cluster involves automating repetitive tasks using Ansible. This setup includes 2 RP3s, 4 RP5s, and an MSI laptop, creating a heterogeneous Docker Swarm. Learn how I configured hardware, OS, and Docker to build a scalable, multi-architecture home lab cluster.
T.J. Tarazevits Engineering BlogT.J. Tarazevits
  1. Building a Docker Swarm - Docker and Portainer
  2. Setting up Traefik and SSL
  3. Deploying my first project - Custom Registries

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