I am trying to plan my home lab to satisfy two different needs:
- I want a stable environment where I will put a relatively expensive NAS and maybe some other Zima boards.
- I also want to try new versions and configurations in an env where I can break stuff BEFORE trying things on my Production environment. I would also like to use that environment to try other things like playing with Kubernetes, Docker, Iceberg, etc. I am a backend software engineer so this is very useful to me. Besides being fun.
So, I am just trying to gather ideas on how to configure this both in terms of software and hardware.
Depends entirely on what “Production” means. In a corporate environment it means something completely different from a homelab
If you’re doing this for real, you’d have two identical environments.
If it’s playing with Docker or Kubernetes, you don’t need anything more than a VM with Linux and Docker.
If you want to get serious, you can also set up a sandbox on EC2.
I was not clear on why I wanted a production environment. The reason is that I want enough stability in it to be used by family and friends. Preferably without breakages. Immediate usages will be as shared storage, e-book management, game centre to run Minecraft for my kind who lives far away from me., etc. Also, the list of services I will make available in production will vary throughout time.
This is why I mentioned a NAS in production. So that the hardware storage just works. But, at the same time, I really do not have the budget to buy two similar NAS and test things in Sandbox.
I really get your point about having two different envs if I want to have perfect stability. But I was trying to figure out if I could make the Sandbox env a little bit less costly but go 80% of the way in terms of catching issues before breaking Production.
I may just buy a lower model of the same brand but lets see if other people suggest another approach.