🏠 What is a Homelab?

A homelab is a personal environment where you can experiment with technologies, test architectures, and learn without risking production systems. Think of it as your own mini datacenter at home, running on whatever resources you can gather — an old server, a few virtual machines, or even cloud credits.

For IT professionals, engineers, and enthusiasts, a homelab is the perfect way to:

  • Learn new technologies by breaking and fixing them.
  • Test tools and workflows before bringing them to production.
  • Simulate enterprise-like setups (firewalls, load balancers, Kubernetes, monitoring, etc.).
  • Build skills in networking, DevOps, and cloud-native practices.

💡 Why I Built My Homelab

I wanted a place where I could:

  1. Experiment safely → Without worrying about downtime or breaking production.
  2. Learn modern technologies → Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD, observability stacks.
  3. Recreate real-world scenarios → Like firewalls, HAProxy load balancing, Active Directory, SOC tooling.
  4. Centralize everything I’ve learned → Into a structured environment I can continuously improve.

This series is my attempt to document and share that journey.

🖼️ My Homelab Architecture

Here’s the high-level architecture of my current setup:

Homelab Architecture Diagram

Global architecture of my homelab on Proxmox VE

  • Proxmox VE is the virtualization layer.
  • pfSense acts as a firewall and router.
  • HAProxy handles load balancing.
  • Multiple networks separate workloads (WAN, LAN, Kubernetes, AD).
  • Dedicated zones for:
    • Workstations / Bastion Hosts
    • Kubernetes Cluster
    • Databases
    • Active Directory (planned)
    • SOC Tools (monitoring, security)

🚀 What This Blog Series Will Cover

Instead of jumping directly into Kubernetes, I’ll build up piece by piece:

  1. What is a Homelab? (this post)
  2. Setting up Proxmox VE and base networking.
  3. Configuring pfSense as the firewall/router.
  4. Building a secure Workstation / Bastion Host.
  5. Introducing HAProxy for load balancing.
  6. Deploying a Kubernetes Cluster with modern networking and storage.
  7. Adding Databases and other backend services.
  8. Integrating Monitoring, Logging, and Security tools.
  9. Future plans → AD, SOC automation, hybrid cloud.

🔮 Next Step

In the next post, I’ll show how I set up the Proxmox VE environment and prepared the foundation for the entire homelab. This includes networking, iptables/NAT, and the first VMs that serve as gateways into the cluster.

Stay tuned!