The Hive Mind: Open Source Adventures on My Beelink Cluster

The Hive Mind: Open Source Adventures on My Beelink Cluster
Photo by Clay Banks / Unsplash


Welcome back, digital explorers and CLI connoisseurs! After giving you a peek inside the blinking, buzzing heart of my homelab hardware, it's time to zoom in on one of its most exciting components: The Hive—my eight-node Beelink mini PC cluster running k3s.

Yes, that’s right—eight pint-sized powerhouses joined in glorious orchestration, running more open-source software than a hacker conference on caffeine. Let’s crack open the lid and see what’s buzzing inside The Hive.

🐝 What’s Running in The Hive?

While each Beelink box could easily double as a tiny space heater, together they form the backbone of a surprisingly capable Kubernetes environment. Here’s what’s currently deployed and keeping the digital gears turning:

🧪 GitLab – CI/CD Playground of Doom (and Delight)

Every DevOps journey needs a CI/CD pipeline, and GitLab is mine. It’s the project manager, repo wrangler, and deployment choreographer—all rolled into one chonky container. I'm using it to version control not just code, but infrastructure as well (thanks, GitOps!).

The learning curve? Let's say there were several containers started, destroyed, and rage-quit before victory. But now, it’s humming—auto-building, testing, and deploying like a caffeinated octopus with a to-do list.

🚀 ArgoCD – GitOps, Meet Kubernetes

Ah, ArgoCD. The GitOps magician that takes your YAML dreams and turns them into running pods. Every time I push to GitLab, ArgoCD makes sure The Hive is in sync—no more wondering, “Did I kubectl that already?”

Bonus: the UI is slick, and the red-to-green color shifts bring the kind of joy only sysadmins truly understand.

🧠 Vault – Secrets, But Make It Secure

Need a secure place to store API keys, tokens, or the passphrase to your encrypted cat photo collection? Vault’s got it covered. It’s currently managing secrets and issuing dynamic credentials like a very picky bouncer at an exclusive nightclub.

I’m planning to level this up soon by moving my Certificate Authority (CA) into Vault. That’s right—self-hosted certificates with a trust chain I control. Because nothing says “homegrown enterprise” like your own PKI.

🏠 Homepage – Mission Control, But Make It Pretty

Homepage is my dashboard of dashboards—a slick, customizable UI that brings order to chaos. Want to know the health of my cluster, links to all my services, or which node is acting like it’s auditioning for a meltdown? It’s all here, in one click-friendly interface.

Plus, it earns serious spouse-points when everything looks “organized and cool.”

🔧 Under the Hood: K3s, Traefik, and Cert-Manager

The magic glue making this possible?

  • K3s keeps Kubernetes lightweight and efficient (perfect for my mini PCs).
  • Traefik handles ingress, routing traffic like a digital air traffic controller with a French accent.
  • Cert-Manager works with Cloudflare to automatically issue and renew TLS certs faster than I can say “acme.sh.”

Future goal: Replace external ACME certs with Vault-issued ones and run a completely self-hosted CA. Just me, my cluster, and a deeply satisfying DNS-01 challenge.

📚 Learning Outcomes (aka: “How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love YAML”)

Since launching The Hive, here’s what I’ve gained:

  • Production-style architecture experience (minus the pager-duty nightmares).
  • Hands-on GitOps workflow skills with ArgoCD and GitLab.
  • Secure secrets management using Vault’s best practices.
  • Ingress routing and TLS using Traefik, Cert-Manager, and DNS automation.
  • Container and cluster monitoring—because what’s DevOps without graphs?

And perhaps most importantly: I’ve learned that distributed computing on tiny boxes is equal parts art, science, and occasional dark magic.

🧠 What’s Next for The Hive?

The journey doesn’t stop here. Upcoming experiments include:

  • Integrating HashiCorp Boundary for zero-trust access.
  • Building a full observability stack with Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki.
  • Automating everything with Ansible + Terraform (because I refuse to click things twice).
  • Contributing back to the open-source projects I'm using—because community matters.

Final Buzz

The Hive is more than a homelab cluster—it’s my proving ground, my curiosity engine, and occasionally, my arch-nemesis. Whether I’m deploying services, chasing down race conditions, or just basking in the quiet joy of a green ArgoCD dashboard, every moment teaches me something new.

And hey, if the world ever ends and only one Kubernetes cluster survives, I like to think The Hive will be out there—buzzing away, quietly issuing TLS certs and deploying containerized apps into the void.

Until next time, stay curious, stay caffeinated, and may your pods always be healthy.