Estella Data Centre
Concrete, cooling, then Kubernetes
Built from an empty room: A+B power, HVAC, structured cabling, VLANs, Proxmox clusters — and a public Arch Linux mirror on top.
- role
- Senior DevOps Engineer
- org
- Estella Studio
- when
- 2024 — 2026
What it is
This one started with a floor plan. Rack and stack, redundant A+B power with UPS and PDUs, HVAC and humidity control, structured cabling, then VLANs and L2/L3 routing before a single virtual machine existed.
Above that: Proxmox VE clusters running Windows Server alongside Arch and Debian, an on-prem Kubernetes footprint, and remote access locked behind Tailscale and WireGuard with Nginx terminating in front. Cloudflare proxies the edge; Sora is the load balancer and exit node.
Then the fun part — hosting an official Arch Linux mirror at high-volume uptime, with cron-driven backups landing in object storage and a secondary archive keeping seven rolling copies.
where the effort went
- Physical96
- Networking88
- Reliability85
- Automation70
the numbers
- Power
- A + B
- Hypervisor
- Proxmox VE
- Backups
- 7 rolling
- Public service
- Arch mirror
UPS + PDU redundant feeds
cron → object storage
built with
- Proxmox VE
- Kubernetes
- Tailscale
- WireGuard
- NGINX
- Cloudflare
- Prometheus
- Grafana
- GitHub Actions
- Docker
- Arch Linux
- Debian
The rack
Named machines, as they appear in the diagram. Yes, they are all named after something.
- SoraLoad balancer · exit node
- acheron-serverOn-prem compute
- natsuOn-prem node
- mizuOn-prem node
- fuyuOn-prem node
- db-centralDatabase
- Linux mirrorPublic Arch Linux mirror
Architecture
Drawn as it was built. Open it full size — the labels are the interesting part.