How to Build a Home Cloud with Proxmox

One day, I realized I wanted a home server to experiment with deployment and infrastructure. Posts on r/homelab and r/selfhosted largely inspired this idea. At first, I considered going the bare-metal route and building a k3s cluster on several Raspberry Pis. However, after comparing costs, limitations, and capabilities, I decided to buy a couple of Lenovo ThinkCentre mini PCs and install Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) on them. At work I’ve actively used cloud providers, so it was important for me to have a user-friendly experience with virtual servers — similar to what a compute cloud offers. Key requirements for the virtualization infrastructure: VMs may be on an isolated network, inaccessible from the home network; easy creation of a Debian server with cloud-init; server management via Terraform. After spending several days searching online, tweaking configs, and reinstalling everything from scratch a couple of times, I came up with a working solution and identified some pitfalls