Advanced

Advanced

Orchestration, high availability, infrastructure-as-code, and the operational habits that separate a homelab from a pile of servers.

Be honest with yourself before starting this tier: almost everything here is optional, and a lot of it is overkill for a home network run by one person. The trade-off is real in both directions - more resilience and repeatability, but more complexity for you to maintain solo, usually without a team to page when something breaks at 2am.

This tier covers multi-node Proxmox clusters and high availability, hosting your own Git server, managing infrastructure as code with Terraform/OpenTofu and Ansible, container orchestration with Swarm or Kubernetes, GitOps-style deploys, secrets management, security hardening, disaster recovery planning, and observability at scale. Treat it as a menu, not a checklist - pick what solves a problem you actually have.

Come here once Intermediate feels comfortable and you're curious what production-grade infrastructure habits look like applied to a home network.

  1. Proxmox Clustering and HA

    Joining Proxmox nodes into a cluster for live migration and automatic failover, and the honest hardware cost of doing it safely.

  2. Self-Hosted Git

    Hosting your own Git server with Gitea or Forgejo - the missing foundation under every "commit it to a repo" instruction from here on, plus CI runners for the GitOps page.

  3. Infrastructure as Code

    Using Terraform or OpenTofu to provision Proxmox VMs declaratively instead of clicking through the web UI, and what it costs you to maintain.

  4. Configuration Management

    Using Ansible playbooks to configure what runs inside VMs, so provisioning and configuration are both reproducible instead of just one of them.

  5. Container Orchestration

    Docker Swarm and k3s/Kubernetes compared honestly against just running Compose on a couple of Proxmox VMs - the page most likely to be overkill in this tier.

  6. GitOps for Homelab

    Making a Git repository the source of truth for what's deployed, with changes rolling out automatically on push instead of via manual commands.

  7. Advanced Networking

    Replacing your consumer router with pfSense/OPNsense, extending VLAN trunking from Intermediate, and where dynamic routing fits (rarely) at home.

  8. Certificate Management at Scale

    What to do once you have more internal-only hostnames than the public-ACME model comfortably covers - a wildcard DNS challenge versus running your own internal CA.

  9. Secrets Management

    Why plaintext secrets in your compose and IaC repos are a real problem even solo, and a pragmatic SOPS-based approach instead of running full Vault.

  10. Security Hardening

    fail2ban, revisiting network segmentation with a security lens, and least-privilege containers - and why "it's just a homelab" isn't an exemption.

  11. Disaster Recovery Planning

    Documenting rebuild steps, actually testing restores, and extending off-site backups to cover a whole cluster instead of just one machine.

  12. Observability at Scale

    Centralized log aggregation with Loki and Grafana, extending Intermediate's per-service uptime checks, and the real storage cost of long-term high-resolution metrics.

  13. Multi-Site Homelab

    A second physical location as real off-site backup or, more ambitiously, a stretched setup - and why the honest version of this for most people is much smaller than it sounds.