About Atarnet

Where enterprise engineering meets hands-on learning

The Mission

Atarnet Homelab is a Kubernetes-based infrastructure running on ARM64 hardware, designed to implement and test enterprise-grade practices in a self-hosted environment. The cluster runs production workloads with proper CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and security controls—treating home infrastructure with the same engineering discipline as commercial systems.

By day, I'm a Software Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer, and Cloud Engineer architecting and building production systems. By night, I'm the DevOps engineer, the SRE, the security team, and the infrastructure specialist—all rolled into one. This hands-on approach has taught me more about distributed systems, container orchestration, and production operations than any certification ever could.

Why Build a Homelab?

The real question is: why not? In an era where "it works on my machine" becomes "it works in production," understanding the full stack—from bare metal to application—is invaluable. My homelab serves three critical purposes:

  • Continuous Learning: Experimenting with cutting-edge technologies like Kubernetes operators, service meshes, and GitOps workflows
  • Real Production Experience: Running actual services with real users teaches lessons no tutorial can provide
  • Self-Sufficiency: Taking control of my data, my applications, and my digital life away from big tech

The Infrastructure

Compute Layer

  • 3x Raspberry Pi 4 nodes (ARM64)
  • MicroK8s Kubernetes distribution
  • Calico CNI for pod networking
  • High-availability control plane

Networking & Security

  • NGINX Ingress Controller
  • Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels
  • Automated SSL/TLS certificates
  • DNS management via Cloudflare

CI/CD Pipeline

  • Jenkins for build orchestration
  • Kaniko for rootless container builds
  • Trivy for vulnerability scanning
  • Helm 3 for deployment packaging
  • Docker Hub for image registry

Observability

  • Prometheus for metrics collection
  • Grafana for visualization & alerting
  • Uptime Kuma for service monitoring
  • Container-native logging

Skills & Technologies

A comprehensive toolkit built through hands-on experience with modern infrastructure and development technologies.

Angular Cobra Ghost CMS Go HTML/CSS/JS Java Kubernetes MinIO Node.js PostgreSQL Python React VNC Vite Vue Web architecture automation ci-cd cicd cloud native cloudflare controllers devops golang gui infrastructure java jenkins kaniko kubernetes networking operators performance security vnc web development

Production Services

Running 10+ production services across multiple domains, each containerized, deployed via Helm, and monitored 24/7. These aren't hobby projects—they're real applications serving real users with uptime SLAs and automated failover.

  • AvidLearner: AI-powered Go learning platform with real-time typing challenges and automated lesson generation
  • Ebook Reader: Self-hosted digital library with progress sync, annotations, and cross-device reading
  • Rebalancer Operator: Custom Kubernetes operator implementing intelligent pod redistribution algorithms
  • LabMan CLI: Sophisticated remote homelab management toolkit with SSH multiplexing and session management
  • Music Streaming: Personal Navidrome instance serving my entire music collection with Subsonic compatibility
  • Monitoring Stack: Comprehensive observability with Prometheus, Grafana, and Uptime Kuma

Homelab Architecture

A practical view of the stack—from the network edge and secure access layer to the MicroK8s cluster, CI/CD pipeline, and key services running in production.

Full stack overview of the homelab hardware, cluster, and service topology.

Hardware

  • ARM64 Raspberry Pi 4 nodes (sv1-atarnet, sv2-atarnet)
  • Network router + LAN for east/west traffic
  • Shared storage for media and backups

Cluster & Access

  • MicroK8s cluster with control plane + workers
  • Cloudflare Zero Trust + tunnels for secure ingress
  • Tailscale for remote admin access

Key Services

  • Jenkins + Kaniko for CI/CD
  • Velero for backups and restores
  • Uptime Kuma, Prometheus, Grafana monitoring

Project Timeline & Achievements

2025

Launched Rebalancer Operator

Developed and deployed a custom Kubernetes operator for intelligent pod rebalancing, optimizing resource utilization across the homelab cluster.

2025

Built AvidLearner Platform

Created an interactive Go learning platform with AI-powered lesson generation and real-time typing challenges, serving educational content to users.

2024

Established Homelab Infrastructure

Set up a production-grade Kubernetes cluster on Raspberry Pi hardware with automated CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and security controls.

2024

Developed LabMan CLI

Built a command-line tool for remote homelab management with SSH multiplexing, enabling efficient infrastructure operations.

2024

Started Homelab Journey

Began building self-hosted services, focusing on privacy, automation, and learning enterprise practices in a personal environment.

The Technology Philosophy

Security isn't an afterthought—it's baked in from the start. All traffic flows through Cloudflare's zero-trust network, containers run with minimal privileges, images are scanned before deployment, and secrets never touch version control.

Connect & Collaborate

Whether you're building your own homelab, wrestling with Kubernetes, or just curious about infrastructure engineering, I'd love to hear from you. Check out the blog for technical deep-dives, explore the services to see what's possible, or reach out via GitHub to collaborate on open-source projects.

This journey is documented openly—successes, failures, and everything in between. Because the best way to learn is to build, break, fix, and share the knowledge along the way.