If you are anything like me, you cannot look at a perfectly functioning piece of technology—or a solid kitchen wall—without immediately thinking: “How does that work?”
That foundational itch to tear things down, figure them out, and re-engineer them is exactly why I built StagNode. My family tells me my spirit animal is a stag, but my power bill clearly says datacenter.
For my very first post, I want to lift the curtain on the living, breathing ecosystem powering this blog. If you are a sci-fi nerd, you might want to strap in—the architecture is heavily inspired by a certain biomechanical leviathan.
The Starburst Fleet: Meet the Infrastructure
I run a multi-cluster Kubernetes environment entirely managed via GitOps and declarative automation. Here is how the fleet shakes out:
Pilot: The 90TB TrueNAS Backbone
Every good living ship needs a Pilot. In my lab, Pilot is a massive tower server pushing 90TB of TrueNAS storage. It serves as the central nervous system for my data, handling everything from personal cloud storage to media, documents, and persistent volumes for my applications.
Moya: The Production Leviathan
Moya is my main production cluster. It consists of three mini PCs and two hefty desktop PCs. It handles my daily production traffic and home automation. More excitingly, those two desktop nodes are packed with computing power dedicated entirely to running my own private AI models locally.
Talyn: The Dev Gunship
You cannot test dangerous ideas on a living ship without things going wrong. That is where Talyn comes in. Named after Moya’s fiercely independent offspring, Talyn is a separate three-node mini PC cluster built exclusively for development. If an experiment goes sideways, it happens here safely out of production.
Keeping it Sane: Automated GitOps with ArgoCD
Manually deploying YAML files across two clusters and a massive NAS is a recipe for disaster. To keep my sanity intact, everything in the StagNode wilderness is managed via ArgoCD.
By tracking my entire cluster state in a private Git repository, I have reached home lab nirvana: true declarative infrastructure. If a node dies or I want to replicate an environment, ArgoCD handles the state synchronization automatically. Plus, their logo kinda jives!
What’s Next for StagNode?
This blog is going to be a scratchpad for my re-engineering adventures. Moving forward, I’ll be sharing deep dives into:
- How I configure and optimize private AI workloads on Moya’s desktop nodes.
- Practical ArgoCD and GitOps patterns for multi-cluster home environments.
- Storage engineering tricks using TrueNAS Core/Scale as a K8s backend.
- The occasional physical world project (because when I’m not writing YAML, I’m usually remodeling our house or holding a hammer).
Thanks for stopping by.