How Much Production Can Fit Into a Home Lab?

Originally published at https://qcserestipy.github.io on March 7, 2026. Introduction My name is Patrick and I work as a Senior HPC DevOps and AWS Cloud Engineer. My day-to-day work revolves around building and operating infrastructure platforms that enable developers and researchers to run complex workloads. In practice this means building Kubernetes platforms that power CI environments, GPU pipelines, and automated workflows. These systems integrate technologies such as Kubernetes, ArgoCD, Harbor registries, Apache Airflow, autoscaling compute infrastructure with Karpenter, and observability platforms based on the Grafana ecosystem. The common theme behind all of this work is automation. My personal engineering paradigm can be summarized in a single sentence: Automation or nothing. If a system cannot be rebuilt automatically, reproduced reliably, and operated without constant manual intervention, it is not finished. This philosophy did not emerge from theory. It emerged from frustrati