Democratizing The Internet (One Node At A Time)

Tags: DevOps , Homelab , Kubernetes

Published Oct. 20, 2025, 7:03 p.m. by wielandtech

After this morning’s AWS outage, which took down roughly 30% of the global Internet, I wanted to share how I’m keeping my website resilient and independent from the big cloud providers.

What started as a simple need to add a Redis cache to my Django website has turned into a bare-metal, three-node Kubernetes homelab. It now hosts my applications and services securely, efficiently, and completely under my control. The goal is simple: reduce dependence on centralized cloud platforms and take one small step toward democratizing the Internet.

From an Idea to a Self-Hosted Platform

Over the past six months, I’ve been steadily learning and building. The process has involved everything from hardware setup to cluster automation. This past weekend marked a big milestone: I deployed an NGINX reverse proxy on my VPS to forward public traffic to my homelab, with TLS termination handled inside the cluster using Traefik and cert-manager.

This setup lets me expose my homelab to the Internet securely, without revealing my private IP address. It was the final piece of infrastructure I needed for a fully operational, self-hosted environment -- and it felt great to see it all come together.

Hardware and Networking

The homelab runs on three Dell OptiPlex 7060 nodes, each with 1GbE and 2.5GbE ports, all connected through a UniFi USW Pro 8 XG switch and a UniFi UCG Fiber gateway. For persistent storage, I’m using a Synology DS923+ NAS connected over 10GbE, providing shared volumes and backups.

Everything is wired for reliability and performance, with Kubernetes taking care of orchestration and load distribution across the nodes.

Software Stack

Here’s the current software stack that powers everything:

• Kubernetes for container orchestration and workload scheduling
• FluxCD for GitOps-style deployment and configuration management
• Traefik as the ingress controller, with automatic TLS certificates via cert-manager
• Redis for caching
• PostgreSQL for databases
• Prometheus and Grafana for metrics and observability
• Synology CSI for dynamically provisioning iSCSI-backed PersistentVolumes from the NAS

Together, these tools form a self-hosted environment that’s both modern and maintainable -- and it’s all running on bare metal.

Why This Matters

This homelab project has been about more than just learning Kubernetes. It’s about ownership, resilience, and independence. Hosting my own infrastructure means I can keep my site and services running even when major cloud providers go down.

It’s also a small experiment in decentralization -- proving that individual developers can still host real services and contribute to a more open, distributed Internet.

Learn More

If you’d like to see the full setup, including the architecture, configuration, and deployment details, I’ve documented everything here:
👉 wielandtech/w_lab on GitHub