Thirty Apps, One Repo: Anatomy of a GitOps Homelab Cluster

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 19:30:00 -0600

Thirty Apps, One Repo: Anatomy of a GitOps Homelab Cluster

Somewhere between running my first app on Kubernetes and running my thirtieth, the problem changed shape. It stopped being “how do I deploy this” and became “how do I know what my cluster is, and how do I change it without nuking & paving.” My answer is a single GitLab repo gitlab.com/caseyrobb/iac: one ApplicationSet generator, one allowlist per cluster, one thin wrapper chart per app, and a handful of infrastructure operators doing the rest. The production cluster, chaos (k0s, six nodes on mini PCs at home — no, the name is not prophetic; mostly), runs thirty-two apps out of that repo and has never had a kubectl apply from a human.

Homelab on Casey Robb

Thirty Apps, One Repo: Anatomy of a GitOps Homelab Cluster

Thirty Apps, One Repo: Anatomy of a GitOps Homelab Cluster