Now that I’ve shared some of my physical infrastructure in my home lab, I want to share the service topology for the specific services I run at home for home automation, secure storage, and even this website.
Posts for: #Homelab
Migrating Kubernetes from Docker to containerd
On December 2nd, a surprise announcement made waves in the Kubernetes Twitter-sphere - that after the upcoming 1.20 release, Docker would be officially deprecated.
Oh no!
Due to widespread confusion over what “Docker” means in specific contexts, many people panicked - myself included. Due to its popularity and ease of use, the Docker engine has become synonymous with “containers”. However, Docker is really an entire ecosystem of container tools and processes, including building and shipping container images. So what does this announcement mean, and what are the implications for everyone using it?
What’s In My Lab
Like many people in IT, I’ve been running a home lab for several years. My home lab has become progressively more complicated over the years as I’ve layered in new technologies that I want to explore and added new services to my home network.
Designing a Homelab
Just as a motorhead might get their endorphine fix attending a vintage car show, I browse r/homelab almost daily and fawn over the beautifully-curated racks full of enterprise grade hardware sitting in some random person’s apartment. I often get the feeling that I won’t be truly satisfied until I have a few racks of my own, full of routers, switches, servers, and disk shelves.
What would I do with them? Aside from stress-testing my home’s electrical wiring, I really don’t know.
The Importance of Homelabs
“Was that in the notes?”
“Where’d you learn that?”
“How do you just know that?”
These are all questions I’ve been asked, in one form or another, over the last 10 years of working in IT. The situations vary, but there’s a common thread to each - an issue identified, a problem solved, a better way to complete some task.
Most of the time, I don’t answer. How do you explain that you knew that one specific thing because of the three hours you spent last month sitting in your cold basement, begging your production NAS to start back up after an upgrade? Well, it’s not production, per se… but to your family or roommates, it may as well be. “It’s a long story. I’ve seen it before. Not here - on my server at home.”