Homelab

People often think you need VMware, Hyper-V, or at minimum Proxmox to run a “real” hypervisor. Something with a web UI, enterprise features, the whole package. But here’s the thing: KVM with libvirt can do virtually everything those commercial hypervisors do. Live migration, memory ballooning, CPU pinning, GPU passthrough, SR-IOV, nested virtualization — it’s all there. The Linux kernel has been a production-grade hypervisor for over a decade. I run NixOS as my hypervisor. No Proxmox, no web UI, just declarative Nix configs and virsh. Let me show you what’s possible. ...

“Autonomous cluster management” — the promise that an AI can monitor your Kubernetes cluster, diagnose problems, and perhaps even fix them without human intervention. It sounds like the holy grail for platform engineers. The reality is more nuanced. In this post I test K8sGPT with a locally running Llama 3.3 70B model on Apple Silicon. No cloud APIs, no data leaving your network, fully sovereign. Is this usable for real cluster diagnosis? Let’s find out. ...

I self-host nearly everything. Kubernetes clusters on refurbished mini-PCs. GitLab on my own hardware. Vault for secrets. Monitoring, logging, all of it. People often ask: why? Managed cloud is easier. AWS, Azure, Google do it at scale and reliably. Why put yourself through this? The short answer: agency. The long answer is this entire article. The spaceship thought experiment In my post about the space container thought experiment I describe a scenario: you wake up in a closed container in space. Everything you need to survive is present, but nothing goes in or out. ...