My Private Cloud/Homelab has been my main hobby since 2019. Growing and shrinking as needed, it’s provided an essential leaning environment for as many open source services as I have time for. I attribute it’s longevity thanks to the fact I can take it anywhere with an internet connection.
Through careful planning, I’ve actually downsized from this impressive stack containing 16TB of ZFS storage, 10Gbe networking and fully segmented VLANs – probably consuming a eye-watering 500W.
I’ve now consolidated to a hyperconverged Dell R610 cluster running XCP-NG as my hypervisor. One node runs 24/7 and handles the essentials, and the second stays powered off until I need the extra power. I currently run over 20 services across containers and VMs, including:
- Virtualised Firewall
- Kubernetes Cluster
- Docker & Docker Swarm
- Nextcloud
- Pterodactyl (game server hosting)
- Various Websites
- VPN Server
- GlusterFS Cluster
- Minio S3 Object Storage
- Docker Registrity
- Metasearch Engine (Searxng)
- Tierd Load Balancing and SSL Termination (HAproxy)
- … and more!
So what exactly is a ‘Homelab’?
A Homelab is any number of computers which create an environment to test software or experiment with a computing concept – a virtual sandbox where you can play technological god and create or destroy virtual machines at will. Named so by r/homelab; if you break it, you can fix it. No need to worry about the threat of angry users or expensive downtime.
So why call it a private cloud? Primarily, it’s a more familiar and self-explanatory term. In technical jargon however, my lab’s current state is a hyperconverged single node platform. It handles virutalised networking, storage, compute and is accessable by me and me alone, which is by definition is a private cloud.
Nowadays I use it for quick and dirty tinkering, testing and learning (a homelab), but also to run 24/7 apps and services I’ve grown fond of along the way (a private cloud). This hybrid approach is definitely not exemplary, but is mercy on the electric bill – and keeps me solving problems to create the most robust architecture I can manage with the resources available.
My journey and understanding of baremetal, hypervisors, Docker and now container orchestration via Kubernetes means that if, for instance, erranminds.net becomes a wordwide phenomenon, I can just add more servers and scale out.
If you want to be bored to death, I wrote about it:
