My journey setting up my home lab started in 2019. I had an old Acer laptop with an i5 chip that was not being used. I also came across a post on Kijii where someone was looking to offload 2 HP Prodesk 600 G3 small form factor desktops running intel i7-7700 chip and was capable of supporting up to 128GB of RAM. The only catch was that they had no ram or disks. I took a chance and picked up 2 desktops.
I then began my search for RAM. This turned out to be harder that I imagined. I finally found Timetec RAM on Amazon and picked up 32GB for $83! In hindsight, I should have picked up more. That RAM today costs a whopping $275.
I also found 2 1GB SATA drives on FB and picked them up for $50. I then assembled the drives, loaded the RAM and booted up the machines and the worked flawlesly!
I decided to install Ubuntu servers and docker on each of the machines. I use Portainer (Thanks Mike!) to manage the docker instances as well as troubleshoot issues with them. I reserve my love for Docker in a seperate post :).
This setup has been incredebly rewarding as it allowed me to run a lot of infrastructure like Redis, Postgres, MySQL as well as host my .NET backend. I got the opportunity to experiment with the technology as well as try out and run infrastructure and services on demand.
I am hoping, over time, to build a self hosted or cloud based infrastructure that is fairly inexpensive to run and manage without inbcuring the massive costs that one would if you use any of the well known cloud providers.
I am looking forward to sharing more as I progress on this journey.
Thanks for reading
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