[organsnyder]

Keeping services running is fairly trivial. Getting to parity with the operationalization you get from a cloud platform takes more ongoing work.

I have a homelab that supports a number of services for my family. I have offsite backups (rsync.net for most data, a server sitting at our cottage for our media library), alerting, and some redundancy for hardware failures.

Right now, I have a few things I need to fix: - one of the nodes didn't boot back up after a power outage last fall; need to hook up a KVM to troubleshoot - cottage internet has been down since a power outage, so those backups are behind (I'm assuming it's something stupid, like I forgot to change the BIOS to power on automatically on the new router I just put in) - various services occasionally throw alerts at me

I have a much more complex setup than necessary (k8s in a homelab is overkill), but even the simplest system still needs backups if you care at all about your data. To be fair, cloud services aren't immune to this, either (the failure mode is more likely to be something like your account getting compromised, rather than a hardware failure).

[kelnos]

You're spending that much time on it because you're doing too much. Your use of the term "homelab" is telling. I have:

* A rented VPS that's been running for ~15 years without any major issues, only a couple hours a month of maintenance.

* A small NUC-like device connected to the TV for media. Requires near-zero maintenance.

* A self-built 5-drive NAS based around a Raspberry Pi CM4 with a carrier board built for NAS/networking uses. Requires near-zero maintenance.

* A Raspberry Pi running some home automation stuff. This one requires a little more effort because the hardware it talks to is flaky, as is some of the software, so maybe 2-3 hours a month.

The basics (internet access itself) are just a commodity cable modem, a commodity router running a manufacturer-maintained OpenWRT derivative, a pair of consumer-grade APs reflashed with OpenWRT, and a few consumer-grade switches. There's no reason for me to roll my own here, and I don't want to be on the hook for it when it breaks. And if any of the stuff in the bulleted list breaks, it can sit for days or weeks if I don't feel like touching it, because it's not essential.

And yes, I've hard hardware failures and botched software upgrades. They take time to resolve. But it's not a big burden, and I don't spent much time on this stuff.

> I have a much more complex setup than necessary

Yup.

> Getting to parity with the operationalization you get from a cloud platform takes more ongoing work.

You don't need this. Trying to get even remotely there will eat up your time, and that time is better spent doing something else. Unless you enjoy doing that, which is fine, but say that, and don't try to claim that self-hosting necessarily takes up a lot of time.

[organsnyder]

It's definitely mostly a hobby, but I also want to get something close to the dependability of a cloud offering.

I started small, with just a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant, then Proxmox on an old laptop... growing to what I have now. Each iteration has added complexity, but it's also added capability and resiliency.

[itchynosedev]

A hidden cost of self-hosting.

I love self-hosting and run tons of services that I use daily. The thought of random hardware failures scares me, though. Troubleshooting hardware failure is hard and time consuming. Having spare minipcs is expensive. My NAS server failing would have the biggest impact, however.

[organsnyder]

Other than the firewall (itself a minipc), I only have one server where a failure would cause issues: it's connected to the HDDs I use for high-capacity storage, and has a GPU that Jellyfin uses for transcoding. That would only cause Jellyfin to stop working—the other services that have lower storage needs would continue working, since their storage is replicated across multiple nodes using Longhorn.

Kubernetes adds a lot of complexity initially, but it does make it easier to add fault tolerance for hardware failures, especially in conjunction with a replicating filesystem provider like Longhorn. I only knew that I had a failed node because some services didn't come back up until I drained and cordoned the node from the cluster (looks like there are various projects to automate this—I should look into those).