cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/60171730

Hey y’all, looking to land my first DevOps Engineering role soon, and figured I should use enterprise software as much as possible for some resume building and personal practice. For reference, I’ve set up a NAS server once before but haven’t got too much experience outside of that. Basing this on some DevOps Engineers I’ve talked to IRL and some friends who hire engineers, but wanted extra community feedback.

Use case: parents are data hoarders, probably have at least 4tb saved composed of every type of media you can think of, so hopefully the whole family can use this when I’m done with it all. Otherwise, aiming to be able to claim experience with enterprise grade DevOps software.

Some of this is personal research, a lot of Reddit research, and some LLM comparisons used to choose between two software systems. Please let me know what you’d keep or change! I’m still kinda new to this :p

Hardware: (old gaming pc)

  • Intel i5-9600K
  • 32GB DDR4 RAM
  • GTX 1070
  • Gigabyte Z370XP SLI
  • Seagate IronWolf 12TB 3.5" SATA

Hypervisor & OS:

  • Proxmox VE (type-1 hypervisor)
  • Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS (VM operating system)
  • cloud-init (VM provisioning automation)

Infrastructure as Code & Automation:

  • Terraform (infrastructure provisioning)
  • Proxmox Terraform Provider (VM automation)
  • Ansible (configuration management)
  • GitHub Actions (CI/CD pipelines)

Containerization & Orchestration:

  • Docker (container runtime/builds)
  • Kubernetes/k3s (container orchestration)
  • Helm (Kubernetes package manager)
  • ArgoCD (GitOps continuous deployment)

Networking & Ingress:

  • Traefik (ingress controller/reverse proxy)
  • MetalLB (bare-metal load balancer)
  • cert-manager (TLS certificate automation)
  • WireGuard (VPN software)
  • Surfshark (VPN service)

Secrets & Security:

  • HashiCorp Vault (secrets management)
  • External Secrets Operator (Kubernetes secret syncing)
  • SSH hardening (secure remote access)

Observability & Monitoring:

  • Prometheus (metrics collection)
  • Grafana (monitoring dashboards/visualization)
  • Loki (centralized log aggregation)
  • Promtail (log shipping agent)
  • Alertmanager (alert routing/notifications)

Storage & Backups:

  • ZFS (filesystem/storage management)
  • NFS (network storage)
  • Persistent Volumes/PVCs (Kubernetes storage)
  • Restic (encrypted backups)
  • Velero (Kubernetes backup/disaster recovery)

Container Registry & CI Infrastructure:

  • GitHub Container Registry or Harbor (container registry)
  • GitHub Runner (self-hosted CI runner)

AWS Emulation:

  • LocalStack (AWS cloud emulation)
  • Terraform AWS Provider (AWS IaC practice)
  • MinIO (S3-compatible object storage)

Self-Hosted Applications:

  • Prowlarr (indexer manager)
  • Sonarr (TV show management automation)
  • Radarr (movie management automation)
  • LazyLibrarian (book management automation)
  • Lidarr (music management automation)
  • Homarr (application dashboard)
  • Seerr/Overseerr (media request management)
  • Jellyfin (media server)
  • qBittorrent (torrent client)
  • NZBGet (Usenet downloader)
  • Immich (photo gallery & backup)
  • Mealie (meal planner)
  • Moonlight (low-latency remote gaming)
  • Kavita (ebook/manga/audiobook reader)
  • Funkwhale (music streaming)
  • Grafana (monitoring dashboards)
  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzBEnglish
    1·
    7 hours ago

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    ESXi VMWare virtual machine hypervisor
    LTS Long Term Support software version
    NAS Network-Attached Storage
    RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
    SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access

    [Thread #291 for this comm, first seen 15th May 2026, 07:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

  • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
    1·
    7 hours ago

    I’ll come at this from a different PoV.

    You’re not going to see an Arr stack running on proxmox in my (professional) environment.

    Yes, Proxmox is making progress there, but you should get some “VMs on ESXi” experience. The free one doesn’t have vCenter, but it’s definitely a tickbox for me as an interviewer. (Hopefully this was on your course)

    Also, get a (small) active directory with 2 or 3 VMs running. Play around with RADIUS, Group policies, etc.

    Do some backups, destroy something and do some restores. I want to hear stories of how you recovered from a disaster. A missing file doesn’t count, I’m saying a failed drive, ransomware (simulated… but… the point is, you need long-term backups) … maybe overwrite 0’s on some of your parents media files and recover them… that’ll get the stress levels up 😉

    Good with the Ubuntu LTS… but do vary the versions (ie support old tech and new)

    1 single HDD? I’d recommend you RAID up some more… or at least take my recommendation on testing your backups

    Also good experience: get a firewall in there somewhere. Try pfSense (or OpnSense) to restrict traffic between some VMs / containers… then you’ll be good for DevSecOps too.

  • foggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    18 hours ago

    100% building a home lab and being able to talk about it openly, from memory, in your own words, from experience, is invaluable for interviews.

    I might update this. I might not. I have a lot to say but In out drinking.

    All I will say now is save this list. You’ll look back at it in 5 years and wonder what half of those things are.

    …

    Okay a bit more from the bar:

    If you want dev sec ops, grafana, elk, build dashboards, get your agents setup in your fleet, get it all secure locally. That alone will impress any interviewer who knows anything.

    Dev ops specifically? Focus on building a local GitLab instance. Use grafana to monitor it. Run some app that has a busy db. Grafana dashboards on that. Oh my goodness, what a HOG you are GitLab! Tune it for your env. Purposely misconfigure something to watch, idk, the RAM keep growing because you didn’t setup redis or some shit.

    The sea is vast. You’re hungry. Employers will see that once you land interviews.

    If you want a ton of dev sec ops ideas, I am a good sounding board. Regular dev ops isn’t my daily grind so I know a bit less. What I do know is if you’re not ready to rebuild a multi node cluster some night after hours, you’re not quite a boss (doesn’t mean you’re not ready). So, emulate that nightmare.

    Back to drinking 🍻

    Edit: double check your *arr ideas bc afaik most of those were abandoned after a few major vulns were uncovered. That was months ago so that may be old hat.

    • appauled@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      1·
      16 hours ago

      Thank you! I know a chunk of the *arr stack isn’t useable anymore.

      I’m trying to get the resume experience so that I can actually land an interview! I’ve gotten an offer from every job I’ve ever interviewed for in my life (mid 20’s) but I can’t seem to land DevOps engineering interviews :./

      • foggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        4 hours ago

        I’m sure the job postings will say, but many dev ops roles are looking for someone with senior experience. Like 8-10 years or the resume is ignored.

        Id say the way to beat this is look for tier iii roles for folks that don’t know what they need is dev ops. Explain the value of what you want to do as a sysadmin to bring value. Then just write dev ops on your resume when you wind up doing dev ops.

  • warmaster@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    15 hours ago

    AWS

    • MinIO: People are migrating from minio to Garage. I haven’t tried it, but people seem to like it.

    Self-Hosted Apps

    • Moonlight: check out games on whales

    • Try Home Assistant, it’s really fun.

    • 4am@lemmy.zipEnglish
      1·
      13 hours ago

      I second HomeAssistant. Plenty of devices that don’t need the cloud, and plenty of DIY devices you can build if you’re handy like that. Been a significant push recently for IR transmitters and for RF Tx/Rx so that “dumb” devices can be controlled smartly; no cloud necessary (unless you want it)

  • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    18 hours ago

    As much as I like Homarr, it’s my dashboard of choice, I’m wondering, with all you have potentially going on, if Homepage would be more suitable. Homarr can do some metrics, but Homepage seems more suitable for lots of metrics. Other than that, it sure looks like you’ve got it wrapped.

    • appauled@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      3·
      18 hours ago

      upon further review, I think I’m going to just set up everything in Grafana due to the vast utility it provides and it’s enterprise capability and adoption. Any thoughts on replacing a purpose built homelab dashboard with custom built grafana dashs?

      • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        16 hours ago

        purpose built homelab dashboard with custom built grafana dashs

        I’ve seen them, but have had no hands on experience. Most of the ones I’ve seen are quite complex tho. Would be interesting.

  • Matt The Horwood@lemmy.horwood.cloudEnglish
    2·
    18 hours ago

    Thats a long list of things to cover, how much free time do you have?

    I would start with setting things up by hand and understand what your doing before you jump into automation, as that will give you a good grounding in how to automate what you setup.

    We’re looking for a DevOps engineer and so far have only got bods that have done Aws certifications, most have experience with a terminal and can’t setup a basic web server even with the internet at hand.

    • appauled@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      1·
      17 hours ago

      Thats a long list of things to cover, how much free time do you have?

      a lot? I’m working about 30 hours/week + wrapping up my undergrad in Computer Engineering online, but should be done with that this year. With that in mind, I need to get as much viable experience as possible in between now and graduation so that I’ll actually be qualified when application time comes

      I’ve set up my server before as a remote desktop running Ubuntu, but essentially didn’t really use it other than tinkering. Then I set up a NAS, then nuked it and set up Proxmox + Ubuntu server and would just SSH into it to tinker.

      Now that I’ve played the game and I’ve seen that i can do it, I want to dive in the deep end of what enterprise grade stuff should feel like. In terms of certs, I’ve done a few AWS courses from AWS but they all seemed pretty… useless? Almost entirely common sense information from the beginner certs and I learned nothing. So I gave up on that and will be aiming for project experience instead.