Home Server and Self-Hosting Infrastructure

Affiliation: Personal Project
Technologies: Proxmox VE, Grafana, InfluxDB, Docker, Ansible, Cloudflare Tunnel
Category: Infrastructure, DevOps, IoT

Description

I designed and deployed a home server system to support self-hosted applications and infrastructure experiments. The server uses Proxmox VE as its virtualization platform and serves as a sandbox environment for DevOps practices, observability, and self-hosted tools. This project allows me to learn and test real-world deployment scenarios in a controlled environment.

Key Features

• Virtualization & Containerization: Runs multiple virtual machines and LXC containers using Proxmox VE for flexibility in managing services.
• Monitoring Stack: Uses InfluxDB and Grafana to monitor server health, resource usage, and uptime through custom dashboards.
• ZTNA with Cloudflare Tunnel: Provides secure remote access to services without exposing local ports to the internet.
• Docker & Ansible: Manages services and automations like backups, updates, and configuration using Docker containers and Ansible playbooks.
• Self-hosted Apps: Hosts various apps like URL shortener, file storage, personal notes, CI/CD runners, and local APIs.

Contributions

• Designed server architecture, virtual network, and service orchestration from scratch.
• Integrated observability tools and alerting systems.
• Wrote infrastructure-as-code scripts for repeatable deployments.
• Used this server for staging real applications before production deployment.

Highlights

• Reduced dependency on third-party services by self-hosting critical tools.
• Gained hands-on experience with infrastructure automation and secure remote access.
• Actively used as a testbed for CI/CD, load testing, and application prototyping.