A home server rebuild went from 10 days of work to 30 minutes
A five-node home Kubernetes setup can now be rebuilt from fresh Ubuntu to a full working stack in about 30 minutes with one command. The hardware includes two Lenovo ThinkPad T480/T480s machines, one 7060 USFF, two Lenovo M720q machines, and a Synology DS223 NAS for storage and backups.
The server stack includes bare metal Kubernetes, kubeadm, MetalLB, Nginx Ingress, cert-manager, ArgoCD, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Sealed Secrets, and Tailscale. Manual rebuilds used to take hours each time a setting was wrong, and the process was repeated about 10 times before it was automated with .
The automation was tested across three hardware makers: Lenovo , HP EliteDesk, and a Dell laptop. The full process and playbooks are public, so a similar setup can use them as a starting point.
Key points
- The setup uses five small computers plus a for storage and backups.
- Manual rebuilds were replaced with after repeated setup failures.
- One command can rebuild the system from plain Ubuntu to the full stack in about 30 minutes.
- The stack uses Kubernetes and several tools for networking, s, monitoring, logs, secrets, and .
- The automation was tested on hardware from Lenovo, HP, and Dell.