The Infrastructure Overview

Exposing home lab services to the internet can be both necessary and risky. Traditional methods — port forwarding, VPNs, reverse proxies with open inbound ports — come with their own set of challenges. This is where Cloudflare Tunnel (formerly Argo Tunnel) comes in as an elegant solution.

In this article, I’ll walk you through how I’ve implemented a secure infrastructure using Cloudflare Tunnel with WebSocket support, running on a Kubernetes cluster with Apache HTTPD as a reverse proxy. This setup allows me to securely expose internal services without opening ports on my residential firewall.

First, a thought about what this is and what it isn’t: this is about website metrics management. Not the only way, but one way for a high-level overview.

I’m focused on sharing concepts about website monitoring and one possible way to manage this in Kubernetes. You can reach the same goal with just Docker and crontab — but I’m using some other tools in Kubernetes because I’m evaluating them for other purposes.