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Platform strategy for farm and homestead services

Purpose

Canonical platform story for this wiki: a small homelab / farm edge footprint using a Raspberry Pi fleet (or similar ARM SBCs), k3s, Longhorn for distributed block storage, optional Rancher for multi-cluster UX, and central or co-located storage servers where justified—tied to farmOS, telemetry, and two-site control-plane assumptions without Kubernetes maximalism.

Doctrine package (reading order, HA semantics, roles): Platform doctrine package — homelab / farm edge.

Sources: K3s / Longhorn / Rancher / Pi captures. Backup/DR: Backup strategy comparison — farmOS, homelab, PostgreSQL, containers, Kubernetes platform backup / DR — Pi, k3s, Longhorn.

Layered view

Layer Components Role for farm / homelab
Nodes Pi (or ARM/x86) servers + agents Run k3s; unique hostnames per quick-start capture
Cluster runtime k3s server/agent Certified K8s API; single-server SQLite default vs HA servers + datastore (architecture capture)
Block storage Longhorn CSI PVCs for farmOS, MQTT, TSDB, Rancher; requires iSCSI client on node (Longhorn CSI on K3s)
Control UX (optional) Rancher on cluster Helm-installed management UI; not required for minimal k3s (Rancher role and timing)
Central storage (optional) NAS / NFS / object store Large media, off-cluster backups, or read-mostly archives—Longhorn vs central storage
Workloads farmOS, brokers, observability Prefer few stateful sets with proven backup paths (Telemetry SoR)

Design principles (this repo)

  1. Pilot-ready ≠ production-ready: single k3s server + agents can be enough for Phase 0/1; HA control plane is a documented upgrade path, not day-one default (platform decision memo).
  2. State is the product: Longhorn protects PVC data; logical DB dumps still matter for farmOS/Postgres (backup strategy comparison).
  3. Rancher is optional glue: adds ops comfort and app catalog; adds attack surface and upgrade coupling—defer until k3s + workloads are boring.
  4. Edge power: Pi fleet at remote farm must align with off-grid power — Demory—k3s is not free Wh/day.