[Just1689]

I know that feeling!

Pulled the trigger on that three times now.

My first cluster was Raspis and ODroids. The two issues I had - not everything runs on Arm (yet) and memory constraints were tough to work with.

My second cluster - 4 Atomic Pis. The (Intel Atom) quad cores were fine but the 2GB of memory was a real problem when I started playing with more interesting workloads.

The current "production" home cluster is 4 old laptops. They're earlier gen i7s and I've dropped 16GB of memory and 1TB spinning disks in each one. I've never been happier with a cluster. I've been free to spin whatever I want up and it just works. Using RKE to setup Kubernetes takes about 5 minutes to build a cluster and I'm using Longhorn for replicated container native storage. I've run experiments for work and my own experience. Whether its Redis / Cassandra cluster or a Kubernetes Operator I wrote, it can always handle it.

[ClumsyPilot]

This sounds like a neat setup - i used to run a set of 3 old compuets, a Nuc, and old laptops. But they were quite low spec, so i sold them and bought a small htpc instead, quadcore, with 16 gigs of ram and 512Gb nvme.

Also using RKE, it looks like the best cluster 'distro' around.

I used longhorn but found it a little slow, putting it on SSD was a bit of a waste. I tried ceph, it was much faster but i just do not understand how it works, etc. Well enoguh to fix anything if the cluster goes wrong.