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Day 4: Home Lab Infrastructure - Personal Cloud Setup

Today you’ll be exploring ways to build your own personal cloud on your own hardware at home. Therefore escaping the “cloud tax” and enhancing your learning experience. As a DevOps your job will also be thinking about “infrastructure”, setting up infrastructure and communicating with management. If you’re serious about enhancing your skills, you will want to consider getting your own hardware. This also applies for software development, proving you can own the hardware will get you ahead of 95% of developers who can barely deploy their own software. This is kind of a prequisite for day 5 where you’ll go ahead and setup kvm libvirt virtualization on linux.

Own it!

Owning your own hardware and proving you can manage it is a competitive advantage for any job. It’s a project which will put you ahead of most other developers or sysadmins.

It isn’t expensive and will give you the most experience because you can test things and break your “environments” as you wish in a safe environment without incurring expensive cloud bills if you forget to destroy a kubernetes cluster which typically would be a minimum of 3 VMs + Master control plane VM.

After you will work with your local infrastructure, you will see that the big cloud providers all provide on top convenience services which makes companies and infra dependent. Therefore, after you become a master DevOps Engineer you will want to simply go back to do things yourself by using virtual machines in the cloud instead of using cloud services as self hosting proves to be much more efficient and cost effective in the long run.

There are open source tools which can help us simulate an AWS cloud locally and we’ll explore these later days.

The refurbished Secondhand Secret

If you have an older laptop, desktop, workstation you can turn that one into your homelab. If you don’t have one you can turn into a “server” then I advise you to buy a secondhand or a refurbished workstation with 64-92 gb ram, 2-3 HDD/SSD drives and 4-12 CPU cores. SO you have enough juice to run a real workload. Similarly if you find cheap Lenovo Thinkcentres you can also get 2-3 of them and simulate your own “datacentre”. Having 1 single juicy workstation is mostly better since you can simulate your datacenter with VM’s anyway:). However, even if you have older laptops or systems you can simulate cloud systems, failure, recovery prety easily ;).

Case study in longevity and Return on Investment

IN 2016 I bought a refurbished HP z620 workstation for less than 2000 euro. 2 CPU 8 core Intel XEON, 92 GB ram to use for virtualization, cyber security, programming, devops, kubernetes etc. Had I bought it NEW with that hardware, I would have spent more than 10.000 euro. Want to know the interesting thing? Even though it was refurbished (second hand) in 2016, it still works perfectly in 2026. I’ve since then only upgraded the SSD drives.

Depending on where you are located take a look at local refurbished shops, in the EU you even get 2 years warranty. Don’t go spending money on

  1. New hardware - Deprecation is a killer, It’s not worth it, especially with the craziness around RAM, video cards etc.
  2. Server racks and blades, etc. They take up a lot of space, before you’re sure you are into infrastructure use workstations since they are more powerwerful than regular desktops and more energy efficient than servers.
  3. “Cool gamer aesthetics colored casing” - No one will see it. Your skills are more valuable.
RaspberryPI ARM notice

Theoretically you can use raspberrypi’s, however when using docker, containers, or kubernetes k8s you will have to manually crosscompile a lot of applications because of the ARM cpu. WHile this is a great way to learn devops, CI/CD it’s also going to frustrate you if you then plan to deploy to cloud as you’d need to keep 2 versions of each app. I ran kubernetes on raspberrypi’s which was interesting.

Extra points are awarded if you manage to interconnect multiple different CPU specs via libvirt in day 5.

Price Comparison Homelab vs Cloud AWS

If you’d get a 32GB RAM 8 CPU EC2 VM with AWS, that would amount to $192/ 167 euro /month. If you get a refurbished thinkcentre for example (not affiliated to amazon nor lenovo) which is 400 euro it’ll pay for itself after 3 months. Yes, you still pay for electricity or internet at home however you’re learning;) at a much cheaper rate.

Install Linux on your hardware

After you have the hardware, wipe the hdd/ssd clean.

It’s now time to install a Linux distribution on your workstation/server/laptop. See day 3 on specifics of installing a linux distribution.

I recommend using Debian for the stability and security aspects. It’s rock solid, i’ve been running it on my personal and professional cloud virtual machines for 15+ years. You can go with whichever distro you prefer. I will be using Debian and demo commands for it in all future sessions so be sure to search for the alternatives for your distro while following along. Since tomorrow on day 5 of 100 days of devops we’ll be using KVM to virtualize other OS’es, the guest operating systems can be anything. Mac, Windows, TEmpleOS, FreeBSD:).

Have your workstation or laptop? Great, jump to day 5 where we’ll be using KVM and LibVirt;)

If you want to own a simple $5 Linux Virtual private server head on to day 7