Building Frank
Building Frank
A tutorial series on building an AI-hybrid Kubernetes homelab from scratch — each post walks through one layer of the stack.
The motivation behind Frank, the Talos Cluster — learning enterprise infrastructure and building interesting projects on your own hardware.
Bootstrapping a Talos Linux cluster with Omni, configuring node labels and zones, and replacing Flannel with Cilium's eBPF networking.
Setting up Longhorn distributed block storage across heterogeneous disks, including a GPU-local StorageClass for AI workloads.
Adding GPU compute to the cluster — the NVIDIA RTX 5070 saga, Intel Arc iGPU via DRA, and patching charts for bleeding-edge Kubernetes.
Migrating from Flux to ArgoCD with an App-of-Apps pattern — adopting existing workloads without downtime.
The most over-engineered RGB setup — controlling ARGB case fans from a Kubernetes DaemonSet via USB HID.
Deploying a resource-efficient observability stack with VictoriaMetrics, VictoriaLogs, and Grafana — and the three gotchas that made it interesting.
Configuring Longhorn backup targets with Cloudflare R2 — and the three Longhorn 1.11 gotchas that rewrote the original plan.
Replacing the SOPS-only secrets workflow with Infisical + ESO — and the three Infisical chart bugs that forced splitting one app into three.
A unified OpenAI-compatible gateway that routes between a local RTX 5070 Ti running Ollama and free cloud models via OpenRouter — one API for everything.
A Kubernetes-native control plane where every AI agent is a Pod, every policy is a CRD, and every execution is a Job — orchestrated by Sympozium.
Getting NVIDIA GPU containers to actually run on Talos Linux — validation markers, machine-specific patches, nvidia default runtime, and the postStart hook trap.
One identity provider for every service — Authentik brings OIDC SSO to ArgoCD, Grafana, and Infisical, forward-auth proxy to Longhorn, Hubble, and Sympozium, and OIDC-backed kubectl access.
Virtual Kubernetes clusters inside Frank — each one a disposable sandbox with its own control plane, resource quotas, and network policies, deployed via ArgoCD.
Deploying Paperclip — an AI orchestrator that organises agents into virtual companies with org charts and budgets — alongside Sympozium, to compare two fundamentally different agentic paradigms.
Running ComfyUI for video, image, and audio generation on the same GPU as Ollama — with a custom GPU Switcher dashboard to manage time-sharing.
Deploying a single-node Talos cluster on Hetzner Cloud as a public edge — Headscale mesh, Caddy reverse proxy, and everything that went wrong along the way.
Deploying a persistent Kali Linux container on gpu-1 as an always-on Claude Code workstation — because laptops sleep and mobile apps have limits.
Adding canary and blue-green deployment strategies to the cluster with Argo Rollouts, Cilium traffic splitting, and VictoriaMetrics metric-gated analysis. Includes a 39-day postmortem on a canary that was deployed, documented, and never actually ran.
Deploying per-user n8n instances on gpu-1 for workflow automation — with Authentik forward-auth, dedicated PostgreSQL, and Prometheus metrics.
Rebuilding the Kali workstation as a hardened, non-root pod with layered defenses — because giving an AI agent skip-permissions demands more than trust.
Adding feature-level health monitoring to the cluster — Blackbox probes for endpoints, Pushgateway for cron heartbeats, and Grafana alerting that fires to Telegram when things go silent.
A lightweight Go service that receives Grafana webhook alerts and automatically updates GitHub Project lifecycle states — turning monitoring signals into actionable project board updates.
Moving TLS termination and reverse proxying into the cluster with Traefik, Let's Encrypt wildcard certs, Authentik forward-auth, and a gethomepage.dev dashboard.
Deploying a relay server sidecar to tunnel the VK remote web UI through to the local agent's workspace data — because a dashboard that can't show your work isn't a dashboard.
The VibeKanban cloud announced shutdown with 30 days' notice. This is how we deployed the self-hosted remote crate — PostgreSQL, ElectricSQL, and a Rust API — before the lights went out.
Deploying a full Kubernetes-native CI/CD platform on pc-1 — Gitea for git mirroring, Tekton for pipelines, Zot for container images, and cosign for supply chain signing.
Splitting VibeKanban out of the Kali agent pod into a shared-volume sidecar, and moving Dockerfiles into a new multi-image repo with matrix CI and cross-repo dispatch — three rebuilds, two gotchas, one clean boundary.
Standing up ruvnet's claude-flow as a 24/7 hybrid pod — a ruvocal web UI plus a shell sidecar — to run as the chaotic-swarm counterpoint to Paperclip's org-chart agents.
A third blog series — research-grade landscape reviews framed as decisions, gated behind a committed dossier before any paper can be drafted.
Collectors on Hop, backend on Frank, AI alert enrichment that knows when 12× baseline is a scraper and when it's Hacker News.
An Ansible controller for the home-lab boxes Talos and ArgoCD can't reach — two operators, four CrashLoops, a login page with no login, and a ping that finally said pong.