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The Frank Papers
The Frank Papers

The Frank Papers

Research-grade landscape reviews for every capability on the cluster. Each Paper maps the vendor space, grades options against a decision-maker rubric, and returns to Frank’s choice as a worked case study — honest about where that choice would not generalize.

Repository & Tooling Cloud-native vs managed homelab vs DIY
Hardware & Nodes x86 + ARM + GPU on bare metal
OS & Bootstrap Talos + Fedora CoreOS + Flatcar + Bottlerocket
Networking Cilium + Hubble + eBPF
Storage Longhorn + Rook-Ceph + Mayastor + Piraeus
GPU Compute NVIDIA + Intel iGPU + DRA + MIG
GitOps ArgoCD + Flux + Jenkins X + Spinnaker
Observability Grafana + Prometheus + Loki + VictoriaMetrics
Backup & DR Velero + Longhorn snapshots + restic
Secrets Management Infisical + SOPS + External Secrets Operator
Local Inference Ollama + vLLM + llama.cpp + TGI + LiteLLM
Unified Auth Authentik + Keycloak + Dex + Zitadel + Authelia
12 Multi-Tenancy with vCluster planned
Multi-tenancy vCluster + Capsule + kiosk + namespaces
CI/CD Platform Gitea + Tekton + Zot
Progressive Delivery Argo Rollouts
Networking Traefik + Authentik + Homepage
16 Self-Hosted Media Generation planned
Media Generation ComfyUI + GPU switcher
AI Agent Orchestrator Sympozium + secure-agent-pod + VK Remote
18 Workflow Automation Beyond CI/CD deferred
CI/CD Platform n8n
Phase 2 — Need lived experience
19 Feature-Level Health & the Alert-to-Issue Bridge deferred
Observability Blackbox + Pushgateway + Health Bridge
Phase 2 — Need lived experience
Public Edge Hop + Headscale + Caddy
21 Self-Hosted Blog Analytics, Cookieless deferred
Observability GoatCounter + Plausible + Umami + Matomo
Phase 2 — Need ≥6 months of real visitor data to judge cookieless vs rich-events
22 Edge HTTP Security at Small Scale deferred
Public Edge CrowdSec + fail2ban + Cloudflare WAF + Caddy rate-limit
Phase 2 — Need accumulated CrowdSec decisions + a real attack to compare false-positive rates
23 Container Runtime Security on an Immutable OS deferred
Observability Falco modern_ebpf + Tetragon + Wazuh agent
Phase 2 — Need broader Falco rule-tuning experience on Talos