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.