Non-Functional Requirements

This document details the non-functional requirements (NFRs) that govern the design, implementation, and operation of the homelab infrastructure.

Security

Secure Boundary Enforcement: Private services must be strictly isolated to prevent accidental exposure to the public internet.
Identity & Access Management: A centralized identity provider must be utilized, supporting multi-factor authentication (MFA).
Secrets Governance: All credentials and sensitive data must be managed through defined storage and rotation policies.
Network Segmentation: Traffic flow between services must be restricted according to clearly defined security policies.

Seamless Remote Access: Remote devices must maintain an experience identical to local network connectivity via secure VPN.
Naming Consistency: A unified naming scheme (*.risu.tech) must be maintained across both public and private services using split-horizon DNS.

High Availability (HA): The system must remain operational across multiple nodes, ensuring service continuity and data consistency.
Workload Rescheduling: Applications must automatically relocate to healthy nodes in the event of hardware or software failure.
Data Persistence: The storage fabric must guarantee data consistency and replication across failure domains.

Resilient Backup: Critical data must be protected through immutable and offline copies.
Disaster Recovery: Restoration procedures must meet defined Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO).
Restore Verification: Backup integrity must be regularly validated through systematic restore testing.

Low-Friction UX: The infrastructure must provide an intuitive and accessible experience for non-technical users.
Single Sign-On (SSO): Authentication must be streamlined to minimize login prompts through a unified session.

Advanced Observability: Centralized logging and metrics must be implemented to facilitate rapid troubleshooting and performance analysis.
Reproducibility: The entire infrastructure configuration must be defined within a central source-of-truth repository.
Documentation: Maintenance tasks must be supported by clear, actionable runbooks.
Automated Documentation Delivery: The source of truth for documentation must be automatically built and deployed to ensure accessibility and consistency.