t h e a l t e r n a t i v e t o w h a t e v e r y o u g o t

I had three Framework Desktops sitting on my desk doing nothing. Ryzen AI Max 300 APUs, 128 GB of unified memory each, a Micron 7450 960GB NVMe in each one dedicated to storage. Way overpowered for a homelab cluster. I wanted a Kubernetes setup I could tear down and rebuild in under 20 minutes, with no cloud, no VMs, just bare metal Fedora and Ansible.

That’s what I built.

The machines

Three identical Framework Desktops. Small, quiet, ridiculous specs for what most people use homelabs for. Each one runs as a K3s server (control plane and worker on every node). At this scale, splitting into dedicated control plane and worker nodes just wastes capacity. Three servers gives me an etcd quorum, so I can lose a node and keep running. Every node runs workloads.