What started as a Raspberry Pi cluster on a shelf has evolved over several years into a 4-node Proxmox cluster running Kubernetes, Ceph storage, site-to-site VPNs to AWS, GitOps pipelines with Terraform, Argo CD, and Helm, and a full observability stack — Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Alertmanager. It sounds like a client environment because it is one, just without a client. Every architecture I recommend to a client, I’ve already tested here first. The homelab is where I break things on purpose so I don’t break them on accident when it matters. It’s also where I learn what the documentation doesn’t tell you, which turns out to be most of what’s worth knowing.