cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/60171730

Hey y’all, looking to land my first DevOps Engineering role soon, and figured I should use enterprise software as much as possible for some resume building and personal practice. For reference, I’ve set up a NAS server once before but haven’t got too much experience outside of that. Basing this on some DevOps Engineers I’ve talked to IRL and some friends who hire engineers, but wanted extra community feedback.

Use case: parents are data hoarders, probably have at least 4tb saved composed of every type of media you can think of, so hopefully the whole family can use this when I’m done with it all. Otherwise, aiming to be able to claim experience with enterprise grade DevOps software.

Some of this is personal research, a lot of Reddit research, and some LLM comparisons used to choose between two software systems. Please let me know what you’d keep or change! I’m still kinda new to this :p

Hardware: (old gaming pc)

  • Intel i5-9600K
  • 32GB DDR4 RAM
  • GTX 1070
  • Gigabyte Z370XP SLI
  • Seagate IronWolf 12TB 3.5" SATA

Hypervisor & OS:

  • Proxmox VE (type-1 hypervisor)
  • Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS (VM operating system)
  • cloud-init (VM provisioning automation)

Infrastructure as Code & Automation:

  • Terraform (infrastructure provisioning)
  • Proxmox Terraform Provider (VM automation)
  • Ansible (configuration management)
  • GitHub Actions (CI/CD pipelines)

Containerization & Orchestration:

  • Docker (container runtime/builds)
  • Kubernetes/k3s (container orchestration)
  • Helm (Kubernetes package manager)
  • ArgoCD (GitOps continuous deployment)

Networking & Ingress:

  • Traefik (ingress controller/reverse proxy)
  • MetalLB (bare-metal load balancer)
  • cert-manager (TLS certificate automation)
  • WireGuard (VPN software)
  • Surfshark (VPN service)

Secrets & Security:

  • HashiCorp Vault (secrets management)
  • External Secrets Operator (Kubernetes secret syncing)
  • SSH hardening (secure remote access)

Observability & Monitoring:

  • Prometheus (metrics collection)
  • Grafana (monitoring dashboards/visualization)
  • Loki (centralized log aggregation)
  • Promtail (log shipping agent)
  • Alertmanager (alert routing/notifications)

Storage & Backups:

  • ZFS (filesystem/storage management)
  • NFS (network storage)
  • Persistent Volumes/PVCs (Kubernetes storage)
  • Restic (encrypted backups)
  • Velero (Kubernetes backup/disaster recovery)

Container Registry & CI Infrastructure:

  • GitHub Container Registry or Harbor (container registry)
  • GitHub Runner (self-hosted CI runner)

AWS Emulation:

  • LocalStack (AWS cloud emulation)
  • Terraform AWS Provider (AWS IaC practice)
  • MinIO (S3-compatible object storage)

Self-Hosted Applications:

  • Prowlarr (indexer manager)
  • Sonarr (TV show management automation)
  • Radarr (movie management automation)
  • LazyLibrarian (book management automation)
  • Lidarr (music management automation)
  • Homarr (application dashboard)
  • Seerr/Overseerr (media request management)
  • Jellyfin (media server)
  • qBittorrent (torrent client)
  • NZBGet (Usenet downloader)
  • Immich (photo gallery & backup)
  • Mealie (meal planner)
  • Moonlight (low-latency remote gaming)
  • Kavita (ebook/manga/audiobook reader)
  • Funkwhale (music streaming)
  • Grafana (monitoring dashboards)
  • appauled@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
    1·
    17 hours ago

    Thats a long list of things to cover, how much free time do you have?

    a lot? I’m working about 30 hours/week + wrapping up my undergrad in Computer Engineering online, but should be done with that this year. With that in mind, I need to get as much viable experience as possible in between now and graduation so that I’ll actually be qualified when application time comes

    I’ve set up my server before as a remote desktop running Ubuntu, but essentially didn’t really use it other than tinkering. Then I set up a NAS, then nuked it and set up Proxmox + Ubuntu server and would just SSH into it to tinker.

    Now that I’ve played the game and I’ve seen that i can do it, I want to dive in the deep end of what enterprise grade stuff should feel like. In terms of certs, I’ve done a few AWS courses from AWS but they all seemed pretty… useless? Almost entirely common sense information from the beginner certs and I learned nothing. So I gave up on that and will be aiming for project experience instead.