Technical guides

Learn how this lab works

Structured overviews for friends, homelab peers, and team members — how NB Cloud is built, why it is built that way, and how your data is protected. Public summaries here; the full Homelab Academy curriculum with tracks and assessments lives in BookStack (invite required).

Lab architecture tour

Public-safe walkthrough of the Main-Cluster: Proxmox, storage tiers, edge ingress, and how a request reaches an app behind the proxy.

IT concepts explained

Core platform vocabulary — DNS, reverse proxies, VPNs, TLS, firewalls, containers, SSO, and backup strategy — explained without dumbing it down.

How we protect your data

TrueNAS for photos and files, Proxmox Backup Server for systems, and automated offsite copies to Cloudflare R2.

Why self-host?

Honest tradeoffs: privacy, control, cost, and the responsibility that comes with running your own infrastructure.

For team members: Ask Nick for BookStack access to Homelab Academy — structured tracks, skill assessment, Mini-Rack exercises, and links to operator runbooks.

Suggested reading order

  1. Concepts — vocabulary before the architecture details
  2. Lab tour — how those concepts map to this cluster
  3. Backups — how photos, files, and systems are protected
  4. Why self-host — motivation and philosophy
  5. NB Cloud homepage — live services you can request access to