But we have AWS at home: It runs on optimism, compromises, and open source

This talk tells the story of my effort to create a cloud-like environment in my home lab. From a single server to a TrueNAS deployment and multiple compute nodes with a 50gbps network, I’ll share my never ending efforts of building my own “AWS at home”.

We’ll follow the journey starting with VMWare and a personal project called “Sandwich Cloud”, to building a baremetal as a service solution, then scrapping it all and moving to Proxmox and OpenStack.

We’ll explore the various technologies that make this possible including:

Proxmox: Used for managing virtual machines that will run the foundation of the home cloud. I’ll talk about why I eventually landed on this hypervisor to run my core services.

Step-CA: An online two-tier certificate authority to provide privately signed certificates to secure communications between services. TLS all the things, even in a home lab.

HashiCorp Vault & Consul: Helps to provide secrets, service discovery and configuration to underlying cloud services. Services running on a cloud need secrets and configuration, services running the cloud also need them.

HAProxy: Setup in a two-tiered configuration to provide highly available layer 7 load balancing for HTTP services.

OpenStack: The original cloud at home, now let’s run it at home.

I’ll discuss the real-world challenges of integrating these technologies, including dependency issues and the complexities of bootstrapping a self-hosted cloud from nothing. We’ll also touch on monitoring, security considerations, and the overall experience and practical learnings of building a personal cloud environment in a home lab. This talk is ideal for those interested in home labs, private clouds, and solving enterprise scale problems at home!