A day-by-day account of moving a home lab off Proxmox and standalone VMs onto a self-built Talos Linux + Kubernetes + ArgoCD cluster.
Proxmox, standalone VMs, and a scattered fleet of Ansible playbooks — what was actually running before any of this k8s work started.
The first commit, the first cluster, and forty-plus 'get it working' commits before anything was actually stable.
Secrets get real, Kubernetes gets upgraded twice in two days, a node experiment gets rolled back, and a dozen apps land almost at once.
The first explicit VM-to-Kubernetes migration commit, a Longhorn false start, and the platform's identity layer arrives.
Two GPUs, one legendary day of device-plugin flip-flopping, working local LLM inference and a license-plate recognition app — all of it eventually torn out.
The busiest single week of the whole migration: a real Longhorn rollout done properly, the Vault-to-OpenBao cutover, and a fresh self-hosted GitLab that wouldn't survive the month.
The last VM control-plane nodes go, the inherited Vault cluster is finally switched off, UniFi's real migration happens — and the self-hosted GitLab built weeks earlier gets torn down for gitlab.com.
Steady-state operations, one more storage crisis, the newest app, and an honest accounting of what's still unfinished.