Kubernetes, Unifi, BGP and Talos in a Homelab

Last year I started looking into Kubernetes for the first time. There are a lot of options - k3s, k0s, Talos, kubeadm - and a lot of new terms to get your head around. I started with k3s, and have been running it for half a year. The last week I have been slowly but surely transitioning to Talos. A fully automated GitOps-driven cluster that I can wipe and rebuild from scratch in under an hour.

• Real LoadBalancer IPs with BGP peering to my Unifi UDM-PRO.
• Traefik with Gateway API for routing. cert-manager for TLS.
• External Secrets Operator with Azure Key Vault for secrets management.

The whole stack is in a single git repository and ArgoCD takes care of the syncing. But how did we get here?

Building a VMware SelfService Portal with PowerShell and Azure

Last month I tried to build a SelfService Portal for VMware vCenter as an alternative to a full automation platform. The goal was to let users provision VMs in minutes, without the overhead that comes with running a full platform. The whole thing runs on Azure services for under $15 per month.

I wanted to see how far I could get using GitHub Copilot and Claude Code to generate most of the code, while still building something I understand and can maintain myself.