Homelab Infrastructure Platform

Apr 1, 2024 · 2 min read

What this proves: Infrastructure — two servers, 40+ containers, VLANs, and Cloudflare tunnels, all of it having to work at 3am.

Overview

This is the foundation everything else runs on. Two servers, Unraid OS, 40+ containers, and a Unifi network stack that keeps it all connected and secure.

The AI inference cluster (dual RTX 3090s) lives on one server. The other runs the bulk of the container workloads: media, document processing, photo storage, home automation, and the self-hosted services that power the blog and analytics.

Server 1 — AI / Compute

  • AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, 128GB RAM
  • 2x NVIDIA RTX 3090 (24GB VRAM each)
  • Runs: vLLM inference, agentic AI workloads, model training

Server 2 — Production / NAS

  • AMD EPYC 4345P, 64GB ECC RAM
  • RTX 3060, 8x16TB Unraid array
  • Runs: 40+ Docker containers, Docker registry, media, storage

Network

  • Unifi Dream Machine Pro (or equivalent gateway)
  • Unifi access points throughout the house
  • VLANs for IoT, guest, and main networks
  • Firewall rules enforcing network segmentation
  • Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels for secure external access

Container Services

  • AI inference (vLLM, Ollama)
  • Media management (Plex/Jellyfin)
  • Document processing
  • Photo storage and management
  • Self-hosted analytics (Plausible)
  • Docker registry
  • Blog hosting (Hugo + Netlify/GitHub Pages)
  • Home automation

Philosophy

Boring infrastructure is reliable infrastructure. Unraid over TrueNAS because it works. Docker over Kubernetes because it’s a homelab, not a startup. Cloudflare tunnels over port forwarding because security matters. The goal isn’t to run the most impressive stack — it’s to run a stack that works, stays up, and gives me full control over my data.

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Derek Armstrong - Payments Engineer · AI · Infrastructure
Authors
Payments Engineer · AI · Infrastructure
I’m a payments & POS engineer who knows the whole stack, from CPU to customer support, and I bring AI into the toolchain end to end: using, building, and maintaining it in production. 12+ years in production payment systems, running on the quiet infrastructure that has to work at 3am whether I’m awake or not.