Complete learning guide — KiteStacks architecture, concepts, certifications, and cloud career prep
This repository has been archived on 2026-06-19. You can view files and clone it, but you cannot make any changes to it's state, such as pushing and creating new issues, pull requests or comments.
Find a file
kenpat 4f91c42780 Rewrite architecture overview and build guide in simple plain-English
Both docs now use everyday analogies (Cloudflare = post office, Authentik = doorman)
instead of technical jargon, making them accessible to anyone learning the project.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-06-18 18:46:47 -05:00
architecture Rewrite architecture overview and build guide in simple plain-English 2026-06-18 18:46:47 -05:00
build-guide Rewrite architecture overview and build guide in simple plain-English 2026-06-18 18:46:47 -05:00
certifications init: complete homelab mastery guide 2026-06-11 20:08:27 -05:00
concepts init: complete homelab mastery guide 2026-06-11 20:08:27 -05:00
interview-prep init: complete homelab mastery guide 2026-06-11 20:08:27 -05:00
learning-path init: complete homelab mastery guide 2026-06-11 20:08:27 -05:00
README.md init: complete homelab mastery guide 2026-06-11 20:08:27 -05:00

Homelab Mastery — KiteStacks Learning Guide

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


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

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

Navigation

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

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.