Right when my homelab was finally humming — three Raspberry Pis running a fully functional Kubernetes cluster — I had to pack up and leave town for Thanksgiving.

A full week away meant I’d lose access to everything.
No cluster. No dashboard. No quick kubectl sessions.

That’s when I turned to Twingate.

The Challenge: Secure Remote Access 🧳

Like most homelabs, my cluster sits on a private subnet with no public ingress — exactly how I want it.
But that makes remote access tricky.
I didn’t want to punch a hole in my firewall or expose the Kubernetes API directly to the internet.

What I needed was something that let me connect as if I were home — securely, without reconfiguring my network.

The Fix: Building a Private Network with Twingate ⚙️

Twingate makes private network access almost too easy.
You define a network, deploy one or more connectors inside your environment, and connect your devices through the Twingate client.

Once connected, you can access internal resources as if they were on your local LAN — but without maintaining a VPN gateway or juggling IP tables.

Their Terraform provider sealed the deal for me.
I could manage everything declaratively, just like the rest of Cloudhaven.

My Setup: Connectors on Kubernetes 🚀

For Cloudhaven, I went one step further and built a reusable Terraform module to deploy Twingate connectors directly into Kubernetes — optimized for physical hosts like my Raspberry Pis.

📦 Check it out here:
Cloudhaven-IDP Infrastructure — Twingate Connector (K8s Physical)

This module:

  • Registers the connector with my Twingate network
  • Deploys it as a lightweight Kubernetes workload
  • Keeps everything self-contained and easy to redeploy on new nodes

Once applied, the connector establishes a secure outbound tunnel — no need to open inbound ports.

Going Further: Accessing the Kubernetes API 🧩

With the connector live, I registered my Kubernetes API server as a resource in Twingate.
That single step made it possible to run kubectl from anywhere — without exposing the control plane to the public internet.

From my laptop, I just connect through Twingate and work like I’m sitting right next to the cluster.
It’s seamless, and the latency is barely noticeable.

Why I’m Keeping It 🧠

Twingate solved a problem I didn’t want to over-engineer.
It’s private, secure, and fits cleanly into my Terraform workflow.
And the best part — I can keep building Cloudhaven from anywhere.

No more worrying about IPs, firewalls, or whether my home router decided to restart itself.
Just me, my cluster, and a secure tunnel between them.

This was one of those small wins that feels bigger than it looks on paper —
because it means Cloudhaven keeps running, no matter where I am.