In my previous post, What’s In My Lab Now, 2024 Edition, I detailed my lab’s Active Directory setup which relies on Windows Server 2022 VMs. While that setup has served me perfectly well to date, recent advancements in Samba’s support for Active Directory features, combined with a desire to reduce my need for software licenses in the future, presented an opportunity to experiment with cross-platform AD domains.

Almost four years ago (agh!) I published What’s In My Lab, an overview of the systems and software I use at home for my own personal infrastructure. You might think that at a certain point you achieve some kind of serenity, and the desire to modify or expand is sated. Hah! Guess again.

Running a Kubernetes cluster on a few Raspberry Pi 4s has been a rewarding but challenging experience. The biggest limitation was storage - each Pi was booting from an SD card, which, while convenient, proved to be a massive bottleneck. SD cards are not only slow, but also wear out quickly under constant read/write operations. Over time, I experienced several cases of data corruption which brought that cluster to its knees.

When I kicked off the latest iteration of my homelab project about 10 years ago, everything was harder. Shared storage was a luxury that meant diving into expensive SAN solutions which were neither feasible nor affordable for anyone not running a data center. Containers were still in buzzword territory, and their real-world application was confined either to early versions of Docker (pre-OCI, mind you!), or to cutting-edge cloud-native projects like Google’s Borg.

In early 2020, recent semiconductor startup Ampere announced the Altra, an ultra-dense 80-core ARM64 CPU targeted at cloud computing environments. Patrick Kennedy of ServeTheHome covered the release with an excellent in-depth article last year which I highly recommend reading.

In mid-2020, Oracle became the first cloud provider to add the Ampere Altra to their cloud computing lineup. And in early 2021, Oracle took the unusual step of adding the Altra A1 VMs to their “Always Free” tier, allowing anyone to create ARM64 VMs with up to 4 cores and 24GB of RAM at no cost. I’ve recently started playing around more with my Oracle Cloud account, and decided to use Terraform to spin up a free ARM64 VM to compare its performance with one of my existing Raspberry Pi 4Bs.