> their setup requires a level of effort and commitment that’s not for everyone
Depends!
A lot of people doing this kind of stuff probably do this stuff professionally. That drops most of the “learn how everything works” part of the project and substantially lowers the effort.
I’ve got a half dozen Lenovo Tiny PCs sitting in a cobbled together wooden holder and plugged in to a cheap managed gigabit TP-Link switch. One runs TrueNAS to provide persistent storage, and the rest run Debian+k3s.
Total initial monetary investment was maybe $500 for the PCs, RAM upgrades, some additional hard drives, etc.
Total initial time investment was probably my evenings for a week. And the majority of that was fighting with the friggin’ Debian installer so I could PXE boot the machines (or any future machines) and have them automatically come up fully installed and configured and joined to the cluster with no interaction.
As far as ongoing commitment… it’s been very minimal. It just runs. If anything fails, needs an upgrade, or anything else happens… I just reboot the node and wait 10 minutes while it blows itself away and sets itself back up. Managing workloads is just editing some YAML files and pushing them up to the GitLab instance running on there.
Barely more work than running any of this on AWS and it costs substantially less than the $4k/yr or something I was paying before.
>It’s not meant to be insulting, it’s a joke in good spirit
Oh ok. It's hard to tell you're joking because you've made condescending comments about generalized groups of people in the past. But I've never downvoted them and just moved on. I stopped to reply in this case because I recently saw a bunch "insane petabyte homelab tour" videos where the owners took a lot of pride in showing their setups. It sounded like the "buy a motorcycle" advice was dismissive of their hobby.
Depends!
A lot of people doing this kind of stuff probably do this stuff professionally. That drops most of the “learn how everything works” part of the project and substantially lowers the effort.
I’ve got a half dozen Lenovo Tiny PCs sitting in a cobbled together wooden holder and plugged in to a cheap managed gigabit TP-Link switch. One runs TrueNAS to provide persistent storage, and the rest run Debian+k3s.
Total initial monetary investment was maybe $500 for the PCs, RAM upgrades, some additional hard drives, etc.
Total initial time investment was probably my evenings for a week. And the majority of that was fighting with the friggin’ Debian installer so I could PXE boot the machines (or any future machines) and have them automatically come up fully installed and configured and joined to the cluster with no interaction.
As far as ongoing commitment… it’s been very minimal. It just runs. If anything fails, needs an upgrade, or anything else happens… I just reboot the node and wait 10 minutes while it blows itself away and sets itself back up. Managing workloads is just editing some YAML files and pushing them up to the GitLab instance running on there.
Barely more work than running any of this on AWS and it costs substantially less than the $4k/yr or something I was paying before.