I’ve started out treating reliability in my home lab as something I need to test. This, like backups, is not something you just want to leave to assumptions. There are 7 checks I recommend making before I really depend on a service. These are pulling Internet access, testing host failure, killing the app itself, watching predictive health metrics, verifying configuration history, tracing application dependencies, and making sure I can rebuild from documentation and Git instead of memory.

The article ties together lessons I have learned from things like Proxmox HA, Keepalived, Docker, DNS, monitoring, Git version control, and application mapping.

why not just learn terraform and k8s and get all those features for free? The overhead of a simple k3s setup to bind a couple nodes into a cluster is similar to docker compose but you can manage and debug all your container and pods on a single interface, put everything in a git repository and enjoy life.