This needs a companion guide about how to set up the host machine. Which Linux distro to choose, how to set it up / harden it, nftables / firewall, public key login, etc.
Several people in this thread stating they are working on solutions to assist others learning modern cloud/devops stacks. I’ll throw my name in the hat too. I have a single node home lab running enterprise cloud/devops software stack. I have been working on a project to deploy on-prem cloud (OpenStack) in disconnected environment. I’ve had to learn how to build and host all of the infrastructure required to do this without the luxury of internet access. I realized the same thing can be simulated very cheap in a modern computer with enough cores and memory to run the stack as a single bare metal host. My build cost $1300 2 years ago but the knowledge gained has paid me back 5 figures worth of raises in my career in 16 months.
Having my own personal CloudBox has allowed me to experiment and fail fast. I am ahead in experience and knowledge than the rest of my team as a result. I have a tool they do not. I realize it would be better if we all had a tool like this.
So that’s the pitch, a single node “cloud in a box’, the CloudBox for IT students or professionals to learn any aspect of IT.
Now I just need lots more time to actually turn my prototype into a product.
You are unlikely to find what you're looking for. I'm going to dig into this article a bit, but what you're talking about is inherently hard, and delivers tremendous value to businesses. There are a lot of people doing it for money, and someone builds something that starts to actually work, they get acquired, or they take their project and make it enterprise-y (because that's where the funding is).
There's flatcar and k3os and fedora coreos and talos and lokomotive. There are maybe a dozen others as well, but those are the ones I know something about.
The real problem is that the orchestration of PXE boot, DHCP, name services, server registration, cluster bootstrapping, while simultaneously building a light distribution that makes the right calls on persistence, security, etc. is just *really hard*.
I took at a stab at it myself (failed startup) and have a custom distribution based on alpine, but the amount of work to go from there to everything is so large that it's tough to take on if you're small (and there is the constant desire to go enterprise because of the money)
Thanks, some of this went over my head and sounds way too complicated.
I'd be satisfied with a home-user-oriented manual tutorial, like install Debian with these packages, a nftables setup that firewalls everything but these 3 ports, how to setup auto-update, turn off root & password-only logins, and general things to be reasonably secure; as well as tips for on-going maintenance and so on.
(Repo owner here) I've already automated that with Ansible, including Linux installation (Rocky Linux). There's no hardening yet but that's on the roadmap.
Having my own personal CloudBox has allowed me to experiment and fail fast. I am ahead in experience and knowledge than the rest of my team as a result. I have a tool they do not. I realize it would be better if we all had a tool like this.
So that’s the pitch, a single node “cloud in a box’, the CloudBox for IT students or professionals to learn any aspect of IT.
Now I just need lots more time to actually turn my prototype into a product.