Uploaded November 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Most people build a homelab slowly, over the course of many years, with the spare hardware that they have.
After 3 years of tinkering, Matt Johnson, Senior Site Reliability Engineer, shares with us:
- his motivations behind building a local, private environment for experimentation
- the values that guided his homelab design
- why he started with Incus - linuxcontainers.org/incus - and deferred Kubernetes for 3 years
- how OpenTofu & Ansible are used to bootstrap hosts
- the case for PowerDNS & WireGuard
In the second half, Matt shows us how he spins up a new Incus host, and what are some of the considerations for the entire homelab as this new host takes shape.
If you enjoyed this, you are likely to also enjoy joining makeitwork.club where we discuss about topics like this one every 2 weeks.
Homelab stats:
- 64 vCPUs
- 240GB RAM
- 10.75TB storage
- $5,000 over a 3 year period
- $25/month running costs
00:00 Intro
00:44 Why I started a homelab
02:47 What do I value in a homelab?
05:26 What am I running in my homelab?
09:09 How I settled on Incus?
11:54 Could the kids help with the homelab?
14:31 When do you have time to work on this?
15:45 Does Incus provide scheduling & orchestration?
17:27 What services do others depend on in your homelab?
19:59 PowerDNS & WireGuard
21:48 What do you use for observability?
23:47 What am I working on now?
27:26 A Christmas present for Gerhard
28:47 Key learnings
31:12 How much would 64 vCPUs cost in AWS?
32:26 How do you install the host OS?
34:41 What is the easiest way to consume these learnings?
39:06 Let's spin up a new Incus host
46:37 What would help understand this setup?
48:44 Infrastructure diagram example
51:41 Software for infrastructure diagrams
55:20 What did you learn from your homelab?
58:56 Wrap-up
Most people build a homelab slowly, over the course of many years, with the spare hardware that they have.
After 3 years of tinkering, Matt Johnson, Senior Site Reliability Engineer, shares with us:
- his motivations behind building a local, private environment for experimentation
- the values that guided his homelab design
- why he started with Incus - linuxcontainers.org/incus - and deferred Kubernetes for 3 years
- how OpenTofu & Ansible are used to bootstrap hosts
- the case for PowerDNS & WireGuard
In the second half, Matt shows us how he spins up a new Incus host, and what are some of the considerations for the entire homelab as this new host takes shape.
If you enjoyed this, you are likely to also enjoy joining makeitwork.club where we discuss about topics like this one every 2 weeks.
Homelab stats:
- 64 vCPUs
- 240GB RAM
- 10.75TB storage
- $5,000 over a 3 year period
- $25/month running costs
00:00 Intro
00:44 Why I started a homelab
02:47 What do I value in a homelab?
05:26 What am I running in my homelab?
09:09 How I settled on Incus?
11:54 Could the kids help with the homelab?
14:31 When do you have time to work on this?
15:45 Does Incus provide scheduling & orchestration?
17:27 What services do others depend on in your homelab?
19:59 PowerDNS & WireGuard
21:48 What do you use for observability?
23:47 What am I working on now?
27:26 A Christmas present for Gerhard
28:47 Key learnings
31:12 How much would 64 vCPUs cost in AWS?
32:26 How do you install the host OS?
34:41 What is the easiest way to consume these learnings?
39:06 Let's spin up a new Incus host
46:37 What would help understand this setup?
48:44 Infrastructure diagram example
51:41 Software for infrastructure diagrams
55:20 What did you learn from your homelab?
58:56 Wrap-up
