I'm looking to create a family cloud using Talos and Tailscale to connect 3-4 homes on the same network. My goal is to ensure high availability for services like Pi-hole, Vaultwarden, and other self-hosted applications. I'm planning to use Longhorn on each worker node, which will likely be VMs. I really like the idea of having multiple locations so that if one location experiences a power outage or internet issue (which I think happens more often than hardware failures), my family won't be affected.
Currently, I have a Talos cluster set up and I'm curious if I can adapt it to work with Tailscale, especially since I know there's a Talos patch for Tailscale. I think I could point the load balancer to the Tailscale network, but I'm not entirely sure how to set up Talos for Tailscale. One final thing I'm wondering is whether this is a good idea overall and if Longhorn will function properly in this setup. I'm considering having one or two mini PCs running Proxmox with Talos VMs at each location. I'd love any suggestions on how to design a private self-hosted family cloud with multi-location failover. Would two locations be sufficient?
3 Answers
I set up Tailscale on my ASUS router, making it a subnet router that’s always on. This lets me SSH into it and wake up my other devices. While this might not directly relate to your setup, it’s a practical spot to connect everything in your home network.
Have you thought about your failure domain? For multiple homes sharing a control plane, you'd need to split control nodes between locations to ensure that you can always failover successfully. Plus, etcd needs low latency; geographically distributed nodes can create quorum problems.
You might be better off creating separate clusters for each house and automating their configurations instead of trying to sync everything continuously. And remember, just because it’s a fun project for you, your family may not share that interest and could be resistant to participation, so a local setup might simplify things.
This sounds like a fun project, but keep in mind a couple of things:
1) Maintenance can become a hassle no matter how you engineer it.
2) If your family starts relying on this for important stuff, you’ll become the go-to person if anything goes wrong. I have a home lab and showed my wife how to access backups and manage important things, just in case.
For now, I’d recommend being cautious about what you let the family store there, but having high availability does help alleviate some stress.
As for preparing your family for the future? Maybe get them onboard with some basic homelab skills; that way if you are unavailable for any reason, they won’t be left in the lurch.
I totally agree, as long as it’s reliable, I'm fine with them using it. But yeah, training them on using tech is a must, just in case. My goal is to create a resilient setup so even if my location fails, they have time to switch to another solution.
True, but connecting Talos nodes involves a bit more than just running a standard subnet router. If you have access to the subnet where your devices are, you usually don’t need to bother with the router for Wake-on-LAN. You just need any device that can send magic packets to your network address, and there are plenty of apps for that. WOL usually works across subnets too, but that can sometimes lead to issues.