Hey y’all, looking to land my first DevOps Engineering role soon, and figured I should use enterprise software as much as possible for some resume building and personal practice. For reference, I’ve set up a NAS server once before but haven’t got too much experience outside of that. Basing this on some DevOps Engineers I’ve talked to IRL and some friends who hire engineers, but wanted extra community feedback.
Use case: parents are data hoarders, probably have at least 4tb saved composed of every type of media you can think of, so hopefully the whole family can use this when I’m done with it all. Otherwise, aiming to be able to claim experience with enterprise grade DevOps software.
Some of this is personal research, a lot of Reddit research, and some LLM comparisons used to choose between two software systems. Please let me know what you’d keep or change! I’m still kinda new to this :p
Hardware: (old gaming pc)
- Intel i5-9600K
- 32GB DDR4 RAM
- GTX 1070
- Gigabyte Z370XP SLI
- Seagate IronWolf 12TB 3.5" SATA
Hypervisor & OS:
- Proxmox VE (type-1 hypervisor)
- Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS (VM operating system)
- cloud-init (VM provisioning automation)
Infrastructure as Code & Automation:
- Terraform (infrastructure provisioning)
- Proxmox Terraform Provider (VM automation)
- Ansible (configuration management)
- GitHub Actions (CI/CD pipelines)
Containerization & Orchestration:
- Docker (container runtime/builds)
- Kubernetes/k3s (container orchestration)
- Helm (Kubernetes package manager)
- ArgoCD (GitOps continuous deployment)
Networking & Ingress:
- Traefik (ingress controller/reverse proxy)
- MetalLB (bare-metal load balancer)
- cert-manager (TLS certificate automation)
- WireGuard (VPN software)
- Surfshark (VPN service)
Secrets & Security:
- HashiCorp Vault (secrets management)
- External Secrets Operator (Kubernetes secret syncing)
- SSH hardening (secure remote access)
Observability & Monitoring:
- Prometheus (metrics collection)
- Grafana (monitoring dashboards/visualization)
- Loki (centralized log aggregation)
- Promtail (log shipping agent)
- Alertmanager (alert routing/notifications)
Storage & Backups:
- ZFS (filesystem/storage management)
- NFS (network storage)
- Persistent Volumes/PVCs (Kubernetes storage)
- Restic (encrypted backups)
- Velero (Kubernetes backup/disaster recovery)
Container Registry & CI Infrastructure:
- GitHub Container Registry or Harbor (container registry)
- GitHub Runner (self-hosted CI runner)
AWS Emulation:
- LocalStack (AWS cloud emulation)
- Terraform AWS Provider (AWS IaC practice)
- MinIO (S3-compatible object storage)
Self-Hosted Applications:
- Prowlarr (indexer manager)
- Sonarr (TV show management automation)
- Radarr (movie management automation)
- LazyLibrarian (book management automation)
- Lidarr (music management automation)
- Homarr (application dashboard)
- Seerr/Overseerr (media request management)
- Jellyfin (media server)
- qBittorrent (torrent client)
- NZBGet (Usenet downloader)
- Immich (photo gallery & backup)
- Mealie (meal planner)
- Moonlight (low-latency remote gaming)
- Kavita (ebook/manga/audiobook reader)
- Funkwhale (music streaming)
- Grafana (monitoring dashboards)
Allright, here is my thoughts :)
All tech you list is relevant, but if you’ve never used any of it before, maybe pick out a small subset and learn that to begin with instead. It is exciting and I want to be an expert on all of these aswell, but it is really a lot. Better to be an expert on 3 things than to kind of understand what 30 different things do. When you get comfortable with some basics like for example Ubuntu server and Docker, you can then move on to something else depending on what your priorities are.
On the topic of hosting stuff for family and friends; Really make sure you follow best practises for backups. 3 copies on 2 different devices and 1 copy must be off-site. If you only play around, backups are optional, but as soon as someones memories, important documents or similar relies on your stuff, you better have proper backups.
What are your current status? What do you know today? :)
I agree but running headfirst into this wall was a learning experience for me, even if I did fail miserably.
Good points! I’ve set up an Ubuntu server before, didn’t have RAID but passed through my drives and set up Jellyfin and Nextcloud storage in Docker containers using Portainer. Ended up nuking it to go for Proxmox running Ubuntu server + TrueNAS, but wanted to figure out if I could just as easily run full enterprise grade stuff.
I think I’d be capable enough to struggle my way through a working setup, and there seems to be fewer YT tutorials and stuff for this specific use case, but I still believe there’s enough documentation for each piece that I’d be able to get them connected in time.
Also, not to be too dependent on others, but it seems like between this and r/homelab, there’s a pretty good number of people who’d be able to help me find my way should there be one or two things that I just can’t get figured out.