A five-minute mental model of how a serious homelab is layered — using NB Cloud as the example, without live inventory or secrets.

One sentence: edge DNS and TLS → reverse proxy and SSO → many small apps → Proxmox cluster → shared storage → physical hardware.

Layer cake (top → bottom)

1. Users — browsers, phones, media clients
2. Edge — public DNS, DDoS protection, optional tunnel
3. Ingress — reverse proxy on 443, identity (SSO)
4. Apps — media, files, chat, monitoring (usually containers or LXCs)
5. Compute — hypervisor cluster (Proxmox or similar)
6. Storage — block pool for VMs + NFS/file server for bulk data
7. Physical — servers, UPS, switch, access points

Domain pattern

1. Public names (*.example.com) for what the internet may reach
2. Internal names (*.home.lan) for LAN-only services

Related public pages: nbottini.com lab tour · About this homelab

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