01
LOCAL INFRASTRUCTURE3 components
HOMELAB / KUBERNETES / PLATFORM
Infrastructure Lab
A hands-on infrastructure environment used to turn Kubernetes, Linux, networking and automation concepts into practical operational experience. The lab is a controlled place to deploy, break, troubleshoot and rebuild systems.
CASE STUDY / ARCHITECTURE
Infrastructure Lab / Kubernetes Platform
A real environment for deploying, breaking, troubleshooting and rebuilding infrastructure end to end.
01
Infrastructure Lab / Kubernetes PlatformKUBERNETES · GITOPS · OBSERVABILITYA real environment for deploying, breaking, troubleshooting and rebuilding infrastructure end to end.
02
KUBERNETES4 components
03
GITOPS4 components
04
WORKLOADS3 components
01PURPOSE
Learn infrastructure by operating it.
The lab exists to provide a real environment for infrastructure engineering rather than relying only on documentation, courses or interview exercises.
Kubernetes is particularly useful for this because failures are rarely isolated to one command. A broken workload can involve the scheduler, kubelet, container runtime, CNI, DNS, storage, certificates, networking or application configuration.
The lab provides a place to understand those dependencies by actually troubleshooting them.
02PLATFORM
From Linux hosts to Kubernetes workloads.
The platform is used to work with both application-level resources and the underlying cluster components that make those resources function.
03KUBERNETES
Cluster administration, not just kubectl.
The focus is understanding why the cluster behaves the way it does, not memorizing commands in isolation.
- Pod, Deployment, StatefulSet and DaemonSet lifecycle.
- Services and workload networking.
- ConfigMaps, Secrets, Jobs and scheduling behaviour.
- PersistentVolumes and PersistentVolumeClaims.
- Horizontal and Vertical Pod Autoscaling concepts.
- CoreDNS and cluster DNS troubleshooting.
- Cluster certificates and kubeconfig troubleshooting.
- Control-plane and kubelet dependencies.
04NETWORKING
Networking becomes visible when something breaks.
The lab has also been used to work with CNI concepts and the transition toward Cilium-based networking and security.
05GITOPS
Move cluster changes toward declarative management.
Helm and Kustomize are used as complementary configuration tools, allowing the lab to explore different approaches to managing Kubernetes manifests.
06TROUBLESHOOTING
Failures are part of the platform.
DNS failure
Trace the problem from the application through the Service and cluster DNS layer toward CoreDNS and the underlying network.
Pod failure
Determine whether the cause is scheduling, image retrieval, configuration, resources, networking, storage or the application.
Node failure
Work through kubelet, container runtime, CNI and control-plane dependencies instead of treating the node as a black box.
Certificate / kubeconfig issues
Trace authentication and cluster access through kubeconfig, certificates and the Kubernetes API endpoint.
07ENGINEERING PRINCIPLE
Break it. Understand it. Rebuild it.
The value of the lab is not the hardware itself. It is the ability to safely experiment with systems that are difficult to understand when everything is working perfectly.
A configuration can be changed, a component can be removed, a workload can be broken and the resulting behaviour can be traced through the platform.
That creates operational knowledge that transfers directly to production troubleshooting.
08DIRECTION
Turn the lab into a platform engineering environment.
The next evolution is to make the environment increasingly declarative and automated: GitOps-managed workloads, stronger observability, Cilium networking and security, automated infrastructure provisioning and tighter integration with AI-based operational tooling.
This creates a useful bridge between the Kubernetes administration work already practiced in the lab and the platform engineering direction of modern DevOps teams.