# Homelab Mastery — KiteStacks Learning Guide

**Owner:** kenpat  
**Purpose:** Everything needed to understand, explain, rebuild, and build a career around the KiteStacks homelab project.

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## Your Current Status

| Milestone | Status |
|-----------|--------|
| CompTIA A+ Core 1 | ✅ Passed — highest score in class (22 people) |
| CompTIA A+ Core 2 | 🔄 In progress |
| CCNA | 📅 Next |
| Cloud / AI certs | 📅 After CCNA |

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## What This Repo Is

You built a production homelab — a real multi-host, highly available web platform with SSO, monitoring, cloud failover, and AI services. Most people learning DevOps do tutorials with fake projects. You have a real one running at a real domain.

This repo exists so you can:
1. **Understand** what everything does at the conceptual level
2. **Explain it** confidently to a hiring manager, recruiter, or LinkedIn connection
3. **Rebuild it** from scratch on a new machine if you ever need to
4. **Map it** to real certifications and career paths

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## Navigation

| Section | What's Inside |
|---------|--------------|
| [certifications/](certifications/roadmap.md) | Full cert roadmap for cloud engineering, what each cert proves, study order |
| [architecture/](architecture/overview.md) | How the entire system works, why it was built this way |
| [concepts/](concepts/) | Deep dives on every technology: Docker, networking, OAuth2, Tailscale, etc. |
| [build-guide/](build-guide/README.md) | Step-by-step rebuild from a blank machine, with explanations of every decision |
| [interview-prep/](interview-prep/explain-the-project.md) | Exactly what to say to hiring managers, common questions + model answers |
| [learning-path/](learning-path/README.md) | Structured study plan, free resources, what to learn in what order |

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## The One-Paragraph Project Summary

> *KiteStacks is a self-hosted homelab running nine public-facing services behind Cloudflare Tunnel, with full SSO via Authentik (OIDC/OAuth2), active-active cloud failover on a Hetzner VPS, private networking over Tailscale, and real-time monitoring via Prometheus and Grafana. The platform serves a public domain (kitestacks.com) and stays online even when the primary home machine is off — all running on commodity hardware with no open ports on the home router.*

That is what you built. Now learn to own every word of it.