Motivation

I have actually always wanted to build something as a starting point for my homelab. I have been watching quite a bit of https://www.youtube.com/c/JeffGeerling and taking inspiration from https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/. I never really got started and have been using work and school as excuses for procrastination.

Towards the middle of my Software Engineering undergrad capstone project (not going to cover too much detail of that here, if you are interested, check out my blog about it here — Infogrep), the team decided to pivot to a new business model for our product, Infogrep. We have decided to focus on building an open-source, self-hosted RAG framework (potentially RAGaaS and provide a managed Infogrep service for monetization, like Grafana’s business model), that companies could deploy into their Kubernetes clusters.

Initially, we thought about hosting everything on AWS EKS for testing both the application and our infrastructure deployment procedures. After a bit of pricing calculation, we realized the cost of hosting on EKS was way over our budget, especially given that we were using memory-hungry tools like Elasticsearch and Milvus, so EKS was not feasible.

Luckily, one of our team member reached out to OVH, and they were generous enough to give us a free trial of their OVH-managed Kubernetes service for a month. Everything was running fine, we were able to deploy our application and test the deployment procedures there.

However, the issue now becomes, what do we do when the 1-month free trial ends? This just seems like the perfect opportunity for me to build something at home, which I have been wanting to do for a long time. Having the self-hosted cluster built could

  1. Eliminate all cloud incurred costs.
  2. We have total control over all the infrastructure, down to hardware and physical networking.
  3. Test our deployment procedure for on-premise Kubernetes clusters, which we didn’t have an opportunity to do so with cloud kubernetes engines.
  4. I get my own cluster to play with 😊

Thus, no more procrastination!

Building the Cluster with Raspberry Pi 5s

Specs

Process