2026.09.28
Eden: A GitOps-Managed Kubernetes Homelab
Eden documents a self-hosted lab built around Terraform, Proxmox, Talos, Argo CD, and cloud-native platform components. It suits infrastructure learners, but is not presented as a turnkey deployment.
Purpose
Eden is the personal homelab infrastructure project in mortennordbye/homelab. It is not presented as a one-click product for running a single service. Instead, it documents an environment for experimenting with infrastructure patterns, hosting self-hosted services, and keeping the implementation visible in version control. Kubernetes is the platform, with Talos Linux, Argo CD, and Terraform forming the main management path.
According to the README, Terraform builds Talos virtual machines on Proxmox. After that, configuration arrives through Git, while Argo CD reconciles the contents of k8s/talos/ onto the cluster. The repository also uses ApplicationSets to generate Argo CD Applications from directories. In practice, adding a workload is organized around adding a directory rather than manually maintaining one central application list.
Documented features
The project includes more than application manifests. Its documentation covers architecture, cluster operations, networking, storage, identity, delivery, backups, data, observability, and secrets. The README says the documentation is built from docs/ on every push to main, making the repository useful for readers who want to follow how platform decisions map to configuration.
The listed stack includes Cilium for networking, Traefik through the Gateway API, cert-manager, external-dns for Cloudflare, Falco, Authentik, and External Secrets Operator. Observability components include Prometheus, Alertmanager, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, and metrics-server. For scaling, the project lists KEDA with its HTTP add-on: selected idle applications can scale to zero and be awakened by an incoming request. Storage and data entries include Proxmox CSI, NFS CSI, and PostgreSQL.
The repository also contains blog, portfolio, media-stack, and other application areas. An official release states that the original Portfolio V1 static site was retired in favor of a Next.js rewrite, while a snapshot was retained for rollback. This is an evolving reference environment rather than a fixed software distribution.
Who it suits
Eden is best suited to engineers who already understand the basics of Linux, virtualization, containers, and Kubernetes and want to study GitOps, infrastructure as code, cluster delivery, or observability in a home environment. It can also help readers explore how platform services, applications, documentation, and CI workflows can live in one repository.
If the goal is simply to run one media service or a small self-hosted application, Eden may be unnecessarily elaborate. Its documented path combines Proxmox, Talos, Kubernetes, Terraform, Argo CD, ingress, certificates, DNS, secrets, and monitoring. That implies more learning and maintenance work than a single-host container setup. The supplied sources do not specify minimum hardware or provide a universally applicable installation procedure, so the project should not be assumed to be directly reproducible on arbitrary equipment.
Adoption and deployment considerations
Start by checking hardware, virtualization, and network requirements. The design is explicitly centered on Proxmox and Talos virtual machines. Next, treat GitOps as an operational model, not merely a YAML layout: directory conventions, credential retrieval, CI publishing, Argo CD reconciliation, and rollback all need to be understood together. External Secrets Operator is described as fetching credentials at runtime, reducing the need to commit secrets, but the exact secret service, permissions, and failure behavior still require validation in the target environment.
The README describes vulnerability scanning and runtime detection, but those descriptions are not a security guarantee for every deployment. The supplied sources also do not confirm component versions, upgrade policy, resource requirements, or recovery objectives. Before adopting the design, read the repository and upstream documentation, then validate networking, storage, certificates, DNS, backups, and cluster recovery in an isolated environment. Repository metadata identifies the project as unarchived and licensed under Apache License 2.0; users should still verify how that license applies to the files they intend to reuse.
Sources
Sources checked: 2026-09-28