David Ilie Apps Platform has travelled from country to country. Moving from my home country of Romania to Spain, and then back to Romania after a few years and me in the UK to study, and then partially back to Spain. With this in mind I am keeping my platform in Romania where it is cost efficient, cold and quiet since I am not there most of the time for the platform to be loud. The internet is very fast and I always can remote in case there is a problem.

Throughout the years I have been given access to old enterprise server hardware, ranging from my very first HP Microserver Gen 8 (which I still actually use today) to a HP dl360e G8 server, to then using the cloud while moving, to now using my Dell R730, which uses the HBA card from my Gen 8 server and drive bays from a handed down HP Gen 6 Server.

Proxmox has been my choice as the main host operating system and hypervisor for the sole reason of reliability. I know it can withstand long amounts of uptime and has the best VM performance. I used to use its LXC container feature but not anymore, you'll see why as you continue reading. I am using a RAID 1 for my bootdrive as the only problems I've had are with the drives themselves so I want ultimate realibility while I am away.

I've always had some sort of NAS running for me and family and it has gone through many varations but I've been sticking with TrueNAS and I've been really enjoying it. I initially began when only the core variant.

Now I use TrueNAS scale in a virtualized environment on Nucleus with that HBA card and that Sata controller passed through and an entire Ethernet port for the best performance for both my movies, music, and also my workloads.

On my HP Microserver Gen 8 I have installed at my house in Spain and I have some folders and backups replicated to it overnight using a VPN.

Some people might consider Kubernetes as an abstraction or a waste of resources but in my opinion I like it because of how fun & interesting it is to configure and maintain. I've posted a video on my YouTube Channel regarding my first couple clusters.

My current infastructure is different because it is managed only through code using Flux which makes it better than my previous Rancher based installations which I wouldn't rememember what I did to get it running, making it really difficult to redeploy. Thanks to the k8s-at-home and typically it's not recommended to use the same server for all my worker and master nodes, but that is why I have different types of disks for each one for good IOPS.

I've recently had the ability to discover Home Assistant and automation at my two homes. I like how well it is integrated with my computer and also Apple Homekit.

I have Home Assistant running on Nucleus and I am using it to manage any iOT devices that are present.

At my house in Spain, I have Home Assistant running on a Raspberry Pi 4 equipped with a ZigBee Gateway and other devices to manage lights, outlets, TVs, etc. It runs a lot of services including a cloudflare tunnel to allow me to access it from outside my house