We're designing HELO (Home Enterprise LabOps) to bridge the gap between enterprise-grade engineering and real-world accessibility. For many current and future engineers, hands-on experience with enterprise-grade tooling is nearly impossible without access to a corporate tech stack. Traditional homelabs rarely replicate the complexity, constraints, or workflows of enterprise environments, making it difficult to truly prepare for modern DevOps, SRE, or Platform roles.
We aim to change that with HELO by offering a self-hosted, open framework to simulate enterprise-like infrastructure in your own lab! We hope to empower engineers to experiment, break things, and build real-world skills — without needing a badge or budget from a big-name employer.
Whether diving into GitOps, high-availability clusters, or cloud-native tooling, HELO provides a structured playground to level up, on your terms.
HELO: Test Big Ideas in Small Spaces.
| Category | Tools & Technologies |
|---|---|
| Infrastructure & Cluster Management | ✅ Talos Linux ✅ Proxmox ❌ Cluster API ❌ Cluster Autoscaler |
| Networking & Service Mesh | ✅ Cilium/Hubble ✅ Istio ✅ Gateway API ✅ External DNS |
| Security & Identity | ✅ Cert-Manager ✅ SOPS ✅ age ✅ External Secrets ❌ Mutating Admission Webhooks |
| GitOps & Delivery | ✅ Helm ✅ Talhelper ❌ GoTask |
| Data & Storage | ✅ Cloud Native Postgres ✅ Rook-Ceph ❌ Minio |
| Container Registry | ❌ Harbor |
| Cloud Resource Management | ❌ Crossplane ❌ Vault Secrets Operator |
| Observability & Monitoring | ❌ Kube Prometheus Stack ❌ Mimir ❌ OpenTelemetry |
| CI/CD | ❌ GitHub Action Runner Controller |
Note
✅ = Completed or Working
❌ = Not Started or Not Working
The only tools you need to have in order to get started are:
- Homebrew (on MacOS) - Homebrew
- go-task (on MacOS) -
brew install go-task
Tip
Other tools will be installed automatically when you run the task command.
# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/GoodMannersHosting/home-enterprise-labops.git
cd home-enterprise-labops
# On MacOS, make sure you have go-task installed
brew install go-task
# Initalize the environment
task