Killing the joy of homelabbing with my own expectation

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A developer reflects on how adopting best practices like GitOps, immutable infrastructure, Kubernetes, and declarative systems turned their homelab from a relaxing hobby into an overwhelming burden. They realized that enterprise-grade tooling (NixOS, Fedora Silverblue, CI/CD pipelines) made simple tasks impossibly complex for a solo project. The author shares their decision to simplify by abandoning immutable distros, reducing automation, accepting stateful backups, and prioritizing ease of use over architectural purity.

A prison of my own making

I feel this burden. There are definitely some things you can use from the best practices, but finding the balance between what work and doesn’t work for you is hard. I even experience it with our small team of devs. Somethings don’t work well for easy deployments

It depends on your purposes for the clusters, etc. are. Over the years, I changed my strategies a lot. Right now, I have a cluster for my personal development, solo stuff &amp; also experimentation with new technologies, etc.
I have another server for my business production workloads, which does not experiment, needs to work well &amp; most secure.
If you get your purposes straight, there will be no issue. If you want a single-node cluster to simply work for your solo projects, then yeah, you don’t need to apply all enterprise-grade deployment tactics for a single part-time developer, so to say. 😉

I have done this to myself thinking I could master Kubernetes. I realized that generating Kubernetes configurations from Docker compose.yaml files with Kompose or Podman was easier. I also realized that SystemD is even easier to use than all of those options. Use SystemD whenever you can.