NVMe-over-Fabrics extends the NVMe queue model across a network so a host can talk to remote SSDs the same way it talks to local ones. This post is about how the queue-pair model actually maps to RDMA, TCP, and Fibre Channel transports, why TCP made the protocol mainstream, how namespaces and ANA multipath behave in practice, and where NVMe-oF beats and loses to plain iSCSI and direct-attached disk.
Infrastructure
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NVMe-over-Fabrics: Block Storage at Near-Local Latency Over the Network -
GCP for the AWS-Fluent Engineer Google Cloud from the perspective of someone who already knows AWS: the resource hierarchy that replaces accounts and OUs, IAM that works completely differently, GKE as the best managed Kubernetes, Cloud Run as containers-done-serverless, BigQuery as the genuinely differentiated killer app, and the global VPC model that will break your mental picture on day one. Includes a full AWS-to-GCP service translation table.
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Ceph as Software-Defined Storage: Block, File, and Object Across Every Platform What software-defined storage really means, why Ceph is the reference implementation, and how to actually consume it — RBD block, CephFS file, and RGW object — from Linux, macOS, and Windows, plus deep Proxmox integration and the networking that holds it all together.
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Cloudflare Tunnels for Secure Homelab Exposure How Cloudflare Tunnels work, setting up cloudflared for zero-port-forward homelab access, Cloudflare Access for authentication, configuration via YAML and the dashboard, and an honest look at the privacy tradeoffs and free tier limits.
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WireGuard from Scratch WireGuard from the ground up: Noise Protocol Framework cryptography, key generation, wg-quick configuration, full-tunnel vs split-tunnel routing, site-to-site VPN setup, wg show diagnostics, and honest performance benchmarks against OpenVPN and IPsec.
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Caddy as a Homelab Reverse Proxy Using Caddy as a homelab reverse proxy: Caddyfile and JSON configuration, automatic HTTPS with Let's Encrypt and ZeroSSL, DNS-01 challenge for internal services, health checks, rate limiting, static file serving, and an honest comparison with Nginx and Traefik.
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Grafana + Prometheus Homelab Stack Building a full observability stack for the homelab: Prometheus with node exporter, cAdvisor, blackbox exporter, and SNMP exporter, Alertmanager for notifications, Grafana with provisioned dashboards, and long-term storage with Thanos or Mimir.
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Proxmox VE in Production Building and running a Proxmox VE cluster in production: storage backends (ZFS, Ceph, NFS), VM and LXC management, live migration, high availability with fencing, PCIe passthrough, and backup with Proxmox Backup Server.
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Tailscale for Homelab Networking How Tailscale's WireGuard-based mesh VPN works, subnet routers for LAN access, exit nodes, MagicDNS with split DNS for internal services, ACL policy files, and Headscale as a self-hosted control plane alternative.
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TrueNAS SCALE Deep Dive ZFS pool and dataset design, SMB and NFS shares, iSCSI for VM storage, snapshot and replication jobs, ZFS ARC tuning, SMART monitoring, and navigating the app ecosystem on TrueNAS SCALE.
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IPMI and Redfish: Out-of-Band Management for Humans The second computer inside every server — the BMC — and how to drive it for out-of-band management. IPMI and its modern Redfish REST successor: power control, serial-over-LAN, sensors, and automating it all instead of clicking vendor web UIs.
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Cloudflare Workers and the Edge: Building Globally Distributed Apps with Zero Cold Starts A comprehensive guide to Cloudflare Workers — the edge compute platform that runs JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, and Rust in 300+ locations worldwide with sub-millisecond cold starts. Covers the Workers runtime, KV, R2, D1, Durable Objects, Queues, and building production applications at the edge.
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Crossplane: Infrastructure as Kubernetes — Composites, Providers, and Replacing Terraform A comprehensive guide to Crossplane — the Kubernetes-native control plane for infrastructure. Covers providers, managed resources, composite resource definitions, compositions, claims, RBAC, and running a production platform that lets developers self-serve cloud resources safely.
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Talos Linux: The Immutable, API-Driven Kubernetes OS with No SSH A comprehensive guide to Talos Linux — the minimal, immutable OS designed exclusively for Kubernetes. Covers the architecture, bootstrapping clusters from scratch, machine configs, day-2 operations, upgrades, and why no SSH makes your infrastructure more secure and reproducible.
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Temporal for Durable Workflows: Replacing Fragile Cron Jobs and Distributed Sagas A comprehensive guide to Temporal — the durable execution engine that makes long-running, fault-tolerant workflows simple. Covers activities, workflows, signals, queries, schedules, child workflows, and running Temporal in production on Kubernetes.
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Ansible Playbooks: Idempotent Configuration Management at Any Scale A comprehensive guide to Ansible for sysadmins, DevOps engineers, and homelabbers — covering installation, inventory management, playbook anatomy, Jinja2 templating, roles, Ansible Vault, and practical playbooks for bootstrapping servers, deploying Docker apps, and running bulk OS updates.
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Bare Metal Provisioning: PXE Boot, iPXE, and Fully Automated OS Installs A deep-dive into network booting and automated OS provisioning — covering the full PXE/iPXE boot chain, dnsmasq and TFTP setup, Ubuntu autoinstall, Debian preseed, Kickstart for Rocky Linux, cloud-init post-provisioning, and a complete Docker Compose provisioning stack that takes a server from blank to configured without touching a USB drive.
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GitOps with Flux and ArgoCD: Declarative Deployments Driven by Git A comprehensive guide to GitOps using Flux v2 and ArgoCD — covering the four GitOps principles, repository structure strategies, full setup walkthroughs for both tools, secrets management with SOPS and Sealed Secrets, progressive delivery with Flagger, multi-cluster management, and practical day-to-day workflows.
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Hetzner Cloud for Homelab Overflow: Cost-Effective Cloud Bursting and Geo-Redundancy How to use Hetzner Cloud as a cost-effective overflow for your homelab — bursting compute to the cloud, adding geo-redundancy, and building hybrid setups that combine the best of on-premises and cloud infrastructure.
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NFS Filers in Azure: A Complete Management Guide Everything you need to know about managing NFS storage in Azure — Azure NetApp Files and Azure Files NFS — covering provisioning, quotas, user usage, export policies, snapshots, monitoring, and production best practices.
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Proxmox VE: The Ultimate Homelab Hypervisor A comprehensive guide to Proxmox Virtual Environment — covering installation, ZFS and LVM-thin storage pools, VM creation with VirtIO and cloud-init, LXC containers, networking with VLANs, clustering, backups with PBS, GPU passthrough, and the tools and tricks that make it the homelab hypervisor of choice.
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Terraform for the Homelab: Manage Local and Cloud Resources with One Workflow A comprehensive guide to using Terraform in your homelab — covering the Proxmox provider for VMs and LXC containers, Hetzner and DigitalOcean for cloud overflow, Cloudflare DNS management, remote state with MinIO, reusable modules, and CI/CD workflows that treat your infrastructure like code.
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Self-Hosting vs Cloud: A Cost Analysis Real numbers comparing VPS, home servers, and managed services.
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Load Balancing Strategies Explained Understanding different load balancing algorithms and when to use them.
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DNS Deep Dive for Developers Understanding DNS records, propagation, and common configuration patterns.
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Managing SSL Certificates From certificate types to automation with Let's Encrypt.