Why you should start a homelab?

For anyone working or wanting to work as SRE, devops or any other infrastructure related role, running homelab is the best thing you can do. You will get to experience hands on all of the pains and troubles that will prepare you perfectly to these roles.
Plus is so much fun tinker with hardware.

What’s a home lab?

Anything…
Literally anything can be your homelab. There are people running homelabs from raspberry pies, to whole racks full of servers and other hardware. And that’s the beauty, there are no rules and if someone tries to tell you there are, just ignore him. For me homelab is more about the idea then the hardware or software. Any hardware used for self hosting software you want to is in an essence a homelab. Even if it’s a raspberry pie running some obscure software, it’s a homelab.

Taking things up a notch

But you can take things much further from there. You can dip your toes into managing basic docker container. And before you know it you allocating rack spaces for the new hardware to run clustered applications in kubernetes running inside vm operated by highly available hypervisor.

All of this away from your job in environments that’s yours and where you can brake anything you want.

So why it’s so great ?

You hardly ever come across job that would allow you to spun up infrastructure just for you to try how something works. Is you organization running managed kubernetes and you want to know what it takes to host and manage kubernetes clusters by yourself ? What your personal cloud? Composed of office applications, photo search and backup with AI search, machine backups, metrics, your own overlay network(VPN) and more. Does it sounds appealing or interesting ? That’s why you need your own home lab. Also you will try skill you would hardly get to try in cloud dominated market as is right now.

It’s also kinda ecological, since you can buy old cheap hardware and repurpose it so it doesn’t end up in landfill.

Self development

Managing your homelab is also great tool how to improve your skills, especially if you will give access to the applications to your significant other or your friends.
You will not stop hearing about it if your applications stop working and you will make sure you have proper backup and or monitoring in place.

Security is also huge part of homelabs, unless you only want to access it from internal network you will have to expose it to the internet or provide VPN access.

So what are you waiting? Go grab and old hardware and create your lab.