Homelab Platform Architecture

Problem

Too many moving parts, manual upkeep, and silent failures. Running services on personal infrastructure without guardrails means things break invisibly and stay broken until you notice.

Architecture Overview

• Edge: Reverse proxy with TLS termination handling all ingress traffic
• Identity: Central auth using SSO (Authentik), least-privilege access control
• Services: Isolated containers with clear ingress points and network segmentation
• Data: Automated backups, migration paths, and upgrade procedures
• Ops: Monitoring, alerting, log aggregation, and scheduled maintenance windows

Key Decisions

Central ingress + identity

Every service goes through a single reverse proxy. Authentication is handled at the edge via SSO so individual services don't need to implement their own auth. This reduces attack surface and simplifies onboarding new services.

Monitoring & observability

Metrics (CPU, memory, disk, network) and service health checks feed into dashboards. Alerts are configured for user-impact events, not noise. A "what's broken?" view is always one click away.

Hot standby

Azure servers provide hot standby for critical services. Automatic failover keeps things running if primary hardware goes down.

Reliability Patterns

• Automated backups with tested restore procedures
• Service restart policies and health checks
• Structured logs with tail filters for fast debugging
• "What breaks first" thinking applied to every new service

Lessons

• Standardize configs — avoid snowflake setups
• Document the scary parts (restore procedures, secret rotation)
• Treat infrastructure like code: version-controlled, repeatable, reviewable