Sign in

Homelab - Is this for you?

Homelab - Is this for you?
extreme homelab, servers, datacenter, futuristic

MOVE TO THE CLOUD! Someone has been yelling that phrase for the last ten years, and yes, it's really great... if you know what you are doing.

A long time ago, someone told me, "The iron is cheap, but the hands are expensive." This means that buying hardware is really affordable, but knowing how to use and maintain it properly is what has value and is expensive.

So you need an environment as inexpensive as possible. Some hardware to learn that can break, misuse, break again and lastly, optimize. Where you can deploy your software, and if you forgot a "while(1)", you won't pay $1,000 for your error. You'll break it, run out of space and need to figure out how the hell you did wrong.

Errors need to be cheap or inexpensive because you will FAIL. I assure you, every developer or devops fails exponentially more by the junior they are. You don't need top-notch hardware with the latest of the latest. You don't need an "Intel Core i9 16th gen" or "128GB DDR6 RAM." You need RAM and CPU, of course, but you won't run the NASA. You're going to run your trial and error.

Go and buy some old servers, second-hand (refurbished) stuff, where you can get a deal with:

  • 512GB of RAM
  • 64 CPU Cores
  • 12 Hot-swap 3.5" HDD (or around 20TB Raid 6)

With that, you have plenty of space to deploy virtual machines, Docker containers, learn about Kubernetes, snapshots, backups, networking, firewalls, and a huge etcetera.

And you'll think, "That would be expensive!" but you're wrong. A machine of that characteristic would be around $1,000 to $1,200, including the disks. But you can find smaller deals for $200, which are great too. And if it's too much again, you can learn just with two Raspberry Pi!

But I'm sure you may think, "I didn't get half of those words" is expected. Please don't panic; breathe and stay with me for deep diving in this Homelab world.

As one of the paths inside my tutorials, you'll find a dedicated line on configuring and deploying one server like that. You can spend your time checking the following links and doing some configurations: