Where have I been?

In the previous iteration of this website (there have been many iterations before it). I was running chunwu.dev using Hugo. The site was hosted in Azure Storage and leveraged Azure’s Content Delivery Network.

My hope was that by having a web presence, it would force me to blog about all the various things I am working on - as they say, you don’t understand a topic until you can teach it. With the goal that I would share some knowledge and inspire the next person, as many have done for me. The Problem… blogging requires time and commitment.

In the last 4 years, I have:

  • made a huge pivot in my career.
  • moved to another country.
  • got married.
  • And most recently, my wife and I welcomed our son - Aiden.

What am I trying to achieve?

My personal goal is to have a miniaturized version of the PaaS (Platform as a Service) environment that I am developing at scale for work. Whenever you work on projects that have the scale that I typically work at, we do not typically get the opportunity to work on all aspects of the platform - as there is just too much to do. Building my homelab would help me understand various technologies in detail and if something breaks, I will at least have an idea how to triage.

What have I done so far?

Up to this point, I am running a Kubernetes cluster using 4 Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB. It is configured using one node as the Control Plane and 3 nodes for the data plane. I have a few stateless applications running that have been exposed to the internet using Cloudflare’s Zero Trust tunnel, and a monitoring stack using Prometheus, Grafana and Alert Manager.

If this all sounds interesting to you, great! The existing infrastructure is a bit janky and is a major motivation for today’s post.

What is next?

Initially when I completed custom writing a blogging solution using Python and the Flask framework to kick things off, I encountered my first hurdle. Every time I made a breaking change to my homelab the data would be wiped.

So, as a temporary solution until my homelab stabilizes, I will be using Hugo once again which I will host using Github Pages made available from my custom DNS.

Stay tuned for weekly posts!

-Chun