Back in March, I kicked off this journey with Building My Own GitLab — setting up version control to bring structure to years of scattered configs, scripts, and lab experiments.
By May, I’d expanded that foundation into a full observability stack, and multi-node Docker environment — detailed in AI, Networking, Automation — My Ongoing Lab Project.
Now, in October, the project has a structured roadmap, covering the areas I’ve been working on these past 7 months, and using gitlab to manage all the work i’m doing via Milestones and Issues.
Homelab Automation Roadmap
A structured overview of my homelab evolution — from observability to AI and security integration.
Key Stages
- Observability – Monitor and visualise all systems.
- Alerting – Notify and escalate intelligently.
- High Availability – Build redundancy and resilience.
- Ops Management – Centralise and automate operational tasks.
- NetBox – Define and track the source of truth.
- Automation – Achieve reproducible, versioned infrastructure.
- Backup – Protect data and ensure recovery.
- NGINX – Manage ingress, SSL, and load balancing.
- AI – Extend capabilities with intelligent local systems.
- Security – Harden the stack and integrate identity management.
Project Breakdown
| Order | Stage | Components / Tools | Purpose / Focus |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Observability | Grafana, Prometheus, Uptime Kuma, InfluxDB | Monitor system health, metrics, and uptime |
| 2 | Alerting | Alertmanager, Slack, internal mail | Centralise and route notifications |
| 3 | High Availability | Alertmanager clusters, Grafana mirroring | Build redundancy and fault tolerance |
| 4 | Ops Management | Cron jobs, GitLab CI/CD, scripts | Handle automation, scheduling, and versioned tasks |
| 5 | NetBox | Source-of-truth config, IPAM | Manage network and infrastructure inventory |
| 6 | Automation | k8s, Helm, Gitlab CI, n8n, Jenkins, Ansible, CI/CD, auto-documentation | Deploy and maintain configurations reproducibly |
| 7 | Backup | Rotation, validation, offsite storage | Maintain consistent and recoverable backups |
| 8 | NGINX | HA Proxy, Let’s Encrypt , SSL, load balancing | Secure and distribute access between services |
| 9 | AI | AI Cloud Cluster, Local LLMs, MCP framework | Experiment with local AI integration and n8n orchestration |
| 10 | Security | Nessus, Secrets Management, ELK Stack, OPNsense, Firewall Policy, OAuth, Identity Management, Security Hardening | Centralise logging, identity, and threat detection |
