The author has reconfigured a Kubernetes cluster on a single Dell Optiplex 3070 mini-PC, featuring an i5-9500T processor, 64 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB Crucial P310 NVMe drive. The system runs on Proxmox VE 9 with a ZFS RAID0 setup and consumes approximately 10 W of power.
The cluster architecture uses one virtual machine for the control plane and two worker nodes, deployed via Terraform and Ansible. The setup utilizes Kubernetes v1.36.5, with configurations optimized for resource efficiency by disabling memory ballooning and prioritizing CPU resources for the control plane.
For storage, the author implemented Longhorn 1.12 with replication reduced to two nodes, alongside a local-path storage class for temporary data. To optimize resource usage, the number of CSI sidecar replicas and Longhorn UI instances was reduced, decreasing the total pod count from 22 to 14.
Network traffic is managed using a combination of MetalLB in L2 mode for LoadBalancer services and Envoy Gateway for L7 and L4 traffic routing. TLS termination is handled externally by an Nginx Proxy Manager, allowing for simplified application publishing via HTTPRoute manifests.
