Turn your Homelab into a Dark Factory

Docker Proxmox Firecracker Hermes OpenBao

Overview

I turned my Homelab into a dark factory where I run an orchestrating agent that schedules and delegates work to other agents.

There are two parts to this system: the control plane, which handles where agents run and how they run, and the data plane, which handles the actual work you commit (or not).

We’re going to see how I interact with a personal agent (Hermes, if I have time, I’ll show my own agent) and how Hermes decides what to do next depending on our conversation. Instead of making Hermes write the code, it will delegate the tasks to different coding agents running in our own sandbox (built with Firecracker on top of a Proxmox VM).

I’ll walk you through the different components, how it works and why it matters (in particular the sandbox part).

Links

https://github.com/tavon-ai/proteos
ProteOS runs AI coding agents in isolated Firecracker microVMs.

Tech stack

Docker

Docker is the open-source platform that packages applications and dependencies into standardized, portable containers for consistent execution across any environment.

Docker is the industry-standard containerization platform, enabling developers to build, ship, and run applications efficiently. It uses the Docker Engine (the core runtime) to create lightweight, isolated environments called containers: these units bundle an application’s code, libraries, and configuration. This self-contained approach guarantees consistency, eliminating the 'it works on my machine' problem across development, testing, and production environments (local workstations, cloud, or on-premises). Docker debuted in 2013 and now serves over 20 million developers monthly, simplifying complex workflows like CI/CD and microservices architecture by leveraging tools like Docker Hub for image sharing and Docker Compose for multi-container applications.

https://www.docker.com

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Proxmox

Proxmox is a powerful, open-source virtualization platform that unifies KVM virtual machines, LXC containers, and software-defined storage on a single Debian-based system.

Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE) delivers a bare-metal hypervisor that handles enterprise-grade virtualization without the licensing premium. By combining kernel-based virtual machines (KVM) and lightweight Linux containers (LXC) on a Debian foundation, it lets operators spin up diverse workloads side-by-side. Out-of-the-box support for Ceph storage, ZFS file systems, and software-defined networking means you can scale from a single home-lab node to a highly available, multi-datacenter cluster using a clean, built-in web console.

https://www.proxmox.com

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Firecracker

An open source virtualization technology purpose-built for launching secure, multi-tenant microVMs in fractions of a second.

Built by Amazon Web Services to power resource-intensive services like AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate, Firecracker is a minimalist virtual machine monitor (VMM) that leverages the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to spin up lightweight microVMs. It strips away legacy device drivers and non-essential guest capabilities to achieve a startup time of under 5 milliseconds and a memory footprint of just 5 megabytes per VM. This tight design allows operators to pack thousands of isolated workloads onto a single bare-metal server, combining the ironclad security of traditional hardware virtualization with the rapid deployment and low overhead of containers.

https://firecracker-microvm.github.io

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Hermes

Hermes is an open-source JavaScript engine optimized for fast-start React Native applications on mobile platforms.

Engineered by Meta, Hermes tackles the performance bottlenecks of mobile JavaScript execution by shifting work from runtime to build time. It utilizes ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation to transform source code into compact bytecode, significantly reducing Time to Interactive (TTI) and memory overhead compared to traditional JIT engines. By prioritizing a smaller binary footprint and efficient garbage collection, Hermes ensures that complex React Native apps remain responsive even on resource-constrained hardware (mass-market Android devices and iOS). It is the default engine for React Native, offering seamless integration with Chrome DevTools for native-level debugging.

https://hermesengine.dev

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OpenBao

An open-source, community-governed fork of HashiCorp Vault for managing, storing, and distributing sensitive data.

OpenBao is a community-driven secrets management platform managed under the Linux Foundation's OpenSSF (Open Source Security Foundation). Forked from HashiCorp Vault following its transition to a business source license, the project provides a secure, identity-based infrastructure to store credentials, generate dynamic database keys, and manage certificates. It operates on open-governance principles, ensuring that critical security APIs, transit encryption engines, and access control policies remain fully open source and accessible to the cloud-native ecosystem.

https://openbao.org

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Turn your Homelab into a Dark Factory

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