Cloud Pulumi on Randomly walking in the technical wilderness

(my) docker compose at home

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 12:00:00 +0000

My home infrastructure has been gradually more and more complex, mostly because I like testing things in home before using them in production. This describes bit more my multi-container workload handling (an earlier post in 2024 covered it briefly too, but there has been a lot of developments since).

Background

A lot of the software I self-host consists of single containers. For them I have rather nice pyinfra deployment script for each, which sets up the container as systemd unit, making it possible to start and stop the podman container on demand (and to start it on boot), handle upgrades, etc. in unified way.

Kubernetes at home, next generation, part 2/2: Software

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 12:00:00 +0000

As noted before, I have used kind (Kubernetes in Docker) in home for a while just as Docker compose replacement (and to tinker with some Kubernetes-only tools at home). For a while I have wanted something I could upgrade, and in general HA, and kind is not that.

So I bought some hardware (see earlier post). Then I setup some software (this post).

What did I want? I wanted HA tinfoil hat cluster, in other words:

Pulumi (and pyinfra) at home

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 12:00:00 +0000

As noted in the previous Pulumi post, I had bit too much to write about when describing my current home infrastructure. Due to that, here’s stand-alone post about just that - Pulumi (and pyinfra) at home.

Current hobby architecture

To give a concrete example of how I am using Pulumi in my current hobby infrastructure, this is a simplified version of my hobby IaC architecture. There is a lot of containers both within and without Kubernetes that I am omitting for clarity from the diagram: fw pyinfra/Pulumi provisioning configures local infrastructure, and oraakkeli Pulumi stack (and two pyinfra configurations) handle my VPSes in Oracle Cloud.

DSL (in DSL), or Pulumi?

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 12:00:00 +0000

I have used Terraform professionally and in hobby things every now and then for couple of years now (most recently OpenTofu). I have tolerated it due to the ecosystem (as mentioned in an earlier blog post), but I have never particularly liked it. Why?

The reasons are pretty much the same as why I am not a fan of Helm charts either.

DSLs are not expressive enough, nor powerful enough

Making something ‘human friendly’ (read: huge pile of YAML for devops people) is overrated. The cost of doing that is that automatically validating and formatting it becomes tricky, and the expressed things are mostly too inaccurately defined (‘sure, this is a string, but you are supposed to enter an URL here’). The tooling usually does not help much either, as while programming languages have widespread support in editors, DSLs most of the time do not. Custom configuration languages are not usually much better - being limited by design is not great, nor is it great for integrating with ‘other’ things which use real programming languages.