I just realized I havent talked about NetBird on this blog. NetBird is the peer-to-peer private network that I use for everything in my homelab. It is similar to Tailscale if you know that. But the main difference is that NetBird is able to be self-hosted, everything is opensource. I know that Headscale is a thing for Tailscale but it is not official and you are still reliant on closed-source clients. And a nice bonus for me is that NetBird is a German/European company.

So for my setup I selfhost NetBird on my VPS based Kubernetes cluster, it needs to have publics IPs to work properly when selfhosting. Then every server and device gets a client to connect. OIDC based for user clients, very nice. I am running a DaemonSet on all my Kubernetes cluster with host networking enabled. So each pod is automatically able to resolve private IPs and with some extra CoreDNS config also the private DNS. These clients on the nodes also function as gateways so all pods and services are available to the private network (with the right RBAC of course). And with some DNS forwarding in NetBird configured I can also resolve hostnames from Kubernetes services on my laptop, for example mb.default.svc.cluster.local. The setup is bit more complicated when using multiple k8s cluster, maybe something for a full-sized blogpost, going over how my network is set up in detail.