Talos Linux home lab clusters

The Talos Linux community is great! Not only are they passionate about minimizing the amount of work needed to create on-prem Kubernetes clusters, but they share what they’ve built.

Here’s a selection of home lab clusters our community shared on social media so you could see what’s possible and get started yourself.

If you want to share your home lab for a future post please join the Slack community or mention us on X. If you want to meet other Talos Linux community members face to face don’t forget to sign up for TalosCon.

That’s a lot of Macs

Buroa in the home operations discord has a really nice looking home lab built on Intel Mac Minis! The cherry on top is the gitops automation and fiancé-approval.

Better diagrams than my production

onedr0p, we need to talk…you may not understand what a home lab is. The breakdown of your diagrams and cost on GitHub are better than I’ve seen at most companies! They’re also on the home operations discord where there is a big group of Talos enthusiasts.

Are those SSDs connected via USB?

JJGadgets wouldn’t show us his whole home lab, but he did show the Talos nodes and shared his GitHub repo for managing the whole thing. This is still more compute than most people need.

KubeVirt on retired enterprise desktops

This one is from Michael Trip. He describes his cluster as:

I mainly use it for Kubevirt. I also have a virtual cluster of Talos nodes running on a separate machine. These physical machines are 2 elitedesk 800g2 with 16gb ram each and 256 gigs of storage (OpenEBS at the moment) and a Intel i5 6500. The other node is a prodesk 800 g1 with similar specs.

Supermicro + Proxmox

I’m pretty sure Roel S.’s home lab is more powerful and organized than my first datacenter. He describes the hardware with:

My homelab runs on 2 Supermicro machines with 64 and 32gb ram, and a HP elitedesk 800 G2 with 32gb ram. All three machines run Proxmox, with VMs running Talos.

In the Kubernetes cluster I run several self-developed services, Postgres databases, Redis and rqlite. Other services are Cilium, OpenEBS, Prometheus, Grafana, uptrace, cert-manager with step-ca to provide private TLS certificates and Traefik as ingress.

Everything is set-up using gitops, with Terraform to create the cluster and ArgoCD to bootstrap the applications (https://github.com/roeldev/iac-talos-cluster). I can destroy and recreate the whole Talos cluster + services in ~5 mins. This gives me the confidence to experiment with new things. So if I ever screw up… lol.

Kargo (not the rust one)

I’m still wrapping my head around how amazing this project is that Kat Morgan shared with us. Kargo is a “community project to build the first Platform Engineered Homelab for the ContainerCraft community. The project is a collaboration between the ContainerCraft community and the Kubernetes industry leaders and practitioners to build a common sharable platform for learning, experimentation, and collaboration.”

The whole thing is built on Talos Linux and looks amazing.

Here are some other great pictures people shared with us!

This comes from Carlos on X.

Peter on X says his is “looking a little sad” and we say it looks like a great start!

We don’t know what Hugo is building with his Turing Pi2 but we want some!

If you want to send us your home labs feel free to mention us on X. We love to see pictures of what you’re working on with Talos and how you’re managing it.