The self-hosted application ecosystem

The lab started with trying out Linux servers, virtual machines and Proxmox. It evolved into a practical Ubuntu workstation running a large collection of services under Docker Compose.

Core infrastructure

Dashy: a single private home page for opening the tools I use.
Portainer: management of Docker containers, Compose stacks and service lifecycle.
Cloudflare Tunnel and Tailscale: different ways to reach selected applications and devices securely when away from the workstation.
Code Server and JupyterLab: coding and experimentation without a conventional desktop session on the host.

Data and development

PostgreSQL, MariaDB and Valkey for application storage and cache/queue use cases.
pgAdmin, phpMyAdmin, Adminer and DBGate as database-management interfaces.
Paperless-ngx, Paperless-GPT, Apache Tika and Gotenberg for document management and conversion.
Buffy Workbench for AI experiments and research artifacts.

Observability and reliability

Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Alloy, exporters, Beszel, Dozzle, Uptime Kuma and ntfy provide a path from resource metrics to logs and alerts. See the observability case study.

Home automation

Home Assistant and ESPHome connect a multi-room sensor network with the Z-Wave thermostat. See the thermostat project for the actual implementation.

AI research

The GPU workstation is also my experimental platform for Python and computer vision workloads, model inference and reproducible MLOps workflows. See GPU research platform and MLOps workflow.

You can explore the full searchable inventory on the home page. These are tools in my working environment, not accounts or admin consoles offered for public login.