why not just learn terraform and k8s and get all those features for free? The overhead of a simple k3s setup to bind a couple nodes into a cluster is similar to docker compose but you can manage and debug all your container and pods on a single interface, put everything in a git repository and enjoy life.

I’ve started out treating reliability in my home lab as something I need to test. This, like backups, is not something you just want to leave to assumptions. There are 7 checks I recommend making before I really depend on a service. These are pulling Internet access, testing host failure, killing the app itself, watching predictive health metrics, verifying configuration history, tracing application dependencies, and making sure I can rebuild from documentation and Git instead of memory.

The article ties together lessons I have learned from things like Proxmox HA, Keepalived, Docker, DNS, monitoring, Git version control, and application mapping.