Home Automation

Relevant source files

The home automation stack provides the central intelligence and security monitoring for the physical premises. It leverages a multi-VLAN network topology to isolate IoT devices while maintaining high availability through persistent storage backups and hardware-accelerated computer vision.

Home Assistant

home-assistant serves as the primary automation engine. It is deployed as a multi-container pod featuring the core application and a code-server sidecar for live configuration management kubernetes/apps/home-automation/home-assistant/app/helmrelease.yaml33-115

Multi-VLAN Networking (Multus)

To interact with devices across isolated network segments, Home Assistant utilizes Multus CNI to attach multiple network interfaces directly to the pod. This allows the pod to reside in the cluster network while having a footprint in specific physical VLANs kubernetes/apps/home-automation/home-assistant/app/helmrelease.yaml37-54

Network Name	VLAN Description	CIDR	Assigned Pod IP
`multus-trust`	Trusted devices (e.g., PCs, Servers)	`10.10.10.0/24`	`10.10.10.250`
`multus-not`	No-Internet devices (e.g., Local-only IoT)	`10.10.32.0/24`	`10.10.32.250`
`multus-iot`	IoT devices with restricted access	`10.10.33.0/24`	`10.10.33.250`

These interfaces are defined via NetworkAttachmentDefinition resources using the macvlan CNI plugin with sbr (Source Based Routing) to ensure traffic returns through the correct interface kubernetes/apps/network/multus/config/net-attach-iot.yaml2-36 kubernetes/apps/network/multus/config/net-attach-not.yaml2-36 kubernetes/apps/network/multus/config/net-attach-trust.yaml2-37

Configuration and Sidecars

Code-Server: A sidecar container running ghcr.io/coder/code-server allows for browser-based editing of the YAML configuration files located in /configkubernetes/apps/home-automation/home-assistant/app/helmrelease.yaml90-115
Persistence: The /config directory is backed by a PersistentVolumeClaim (existingClaim: home-assistant), with a separate config-cache for Python virtual environments to speed up restarts kubernetes/apps/home-automation/home-assistant/app/helmrelease.yaml134-149
Ingress: External access is provided via envoy-external at hass.cloudjur.com, while the code-server is restricted to envoy-internalkubernetes/apps/home-automation/home-assistant/app/helmrelease.yaml164-198

Sources:kubernetes/apps/home-automation/home-assistant/app/helmrelease.yaml kubernetes/apps/network/multus/config/net-attach-iot.yaml kubernetes/apps/network/multus/config/net-attach-trust.yaml

Frigate NVR

Frigate provides AI-powered video surveillance. It integrates with the cluster’s hardware acceleration and uses MQTT for event bus communication.

Camera Configuration and go2rtc

Frigate utilizes go2rtc to manage high-performance RTSP restreaming from Reolink cameras kubernetes/apps/home-automation/frigate/app/resources/config.yml55-70

Hardware Acceleration: The deployment is configured to use Intel QuickSync (LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME: i965) for video decoding kubernetes/apps/home-automation/frigate/app/helmrelease.yaml32
Storage: Video recordings are stored on a remote NFS share (smb.cloudjur.com) mounted at /media/frigate, while high-frequency IO (shm) uses an emptyDir backed by RAM to prevent disk wear kubernetes/apps/home-automation/frigate/app/helmrelease.yaml103-122
Object Detection: Configured to track person and animal objects kubernetes/apps/home-automation/frigate/app/resources/config.yml47-48 Detection is globally managed but can be overridden per camera, such as the reolink_rlc1212a_frontdoor which defines specific zones for alerts kubernetes/apps/home-automation/frigate/app/resources/config.yml78-116

Entity Integration Diagram

The following diagram illustrates the relationship between Frigate’s configuration entities and the underlying infrastructure.

Title: Frigate Logic to Infrastructure Mapping

[Flowchart Diagram]

Sources:kubernetes/apps/home-automation/frigate/app/resources/config.yml kubernetes/apps/home-automation/frigate/app/helmrelease.yaml

Mosquitto MQTT Broker

Mosquitto acts as the central message bus for the home automation ecosystem, facilitating communication between Frigate, Home Assistant, and various IoT sensors.

Namespace: Resides in the database namespace kubernetes/apps/database/kustomization.yaml11
Internal Discovery: Services connect via the internal DNS name mosquitto.database.svc.cluster.localkubernetes/apps/home-automation/frigate/app/resources/config.yml9
Persistence: Uses a standard PVC to maintain the Mosquitto persistence database across pod restarts.

Data Flow Architecture

The diagram below shows how data flows through the automation stack using the code-defined endpoints.

Title: Automation Data Flow

[Flowchart Diagram]

Sources:kubernetes/apps/home-automation/home-assistant/app/helmrelease.yaml39-54 kubernetes/apps/home-automation/frigate/app/resources/config.yml8-12 kubernetes/apps/database/kustomization.yaml4-12

Database Layer

While Home Assistant uses a local SQLite database by default, other automation-adjacent services rely on the cloudnative-pg (PostgreSQL) cluster.

Postgres Cluster: A single-instance cluster (instances: 1) using local-hostpath storage for performance kubernetes/apps/database/cloudnative-pg/cluster/cluster.yaml11-19
Backups: WAL (Write-Ahead Log) archiving is performed to an S3-compatible Garage bucket at s3://postgresql/kubernetes/apps/database/cloudnative-pg/cluster/cluster.yaml42-49
Daily Dumps: A CronJob executes daily to create logical backups (pg_dump) of specific databases like authentik and sure, which are stored on an NFS share for long-term retention kubernetes/apps/database/cloudnative-pg/backup/helmrelease.yaml24-64

Sources:kubernetes/apps/database/cloudnative-pg/cluster/cluster.yaml kubernetes/apps/database/cloudnative-pg/backup/helmrelease.yaml

Cloudjur

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Home-Automation