2 posts tagged with "self-hosting"

I've normally resorted to buying raspberry pi's (I now have a Model 2B, 3B and 4) and don't have any major self-hosting requirements so I considered clustering them together. Given the current ARM architecture limitations on the older models, I decided I will bite the bullet and buy some more dedicated hardware. I also figured I could:

• Add the raspberry pi's into the cluster for some more resources if need be at a later date.
• Use the raspberry pi's as an isolated sandbox for testing

With Raspberry Pi 4's currently in low stocks, I started exploring mini PCs/NUCs. They are actually pretty cool, the specs are much better, the costs aren't that much higher and they are built to last.

I ended up getting Intel NUC 11 Essential Kit Celeron N4505 (Atlas Canyon) which was on special at CentreCom. I unboxed and plugged it in immediately only to realise that it is pretty barebones unfortunately.

The site doesn't cover it but it doesn't come with any pre-installed HDD or RAM (that's why it was cheap!) so I needed to get those off Amazon. Here's what I bought:

2 X 8GB DDR4 RAM

1 x 500GB SSD Hard Drive

Installing them were pretty easy - plug n play, I was then ready to rock n roll!

I've been dabbling with a few self hosted services on my laptop or a raspberry pi for a while now but I now have a need to run some of these services on going. I've also wanted to become more comfortable with kubernetes administration so this is also a great opportunity for me to learn something but also run a few practical services at home.

There are some amazing resources available that I have been leaning on heavily but I find writing things down will help make some of the key concepts stick. I'm hoping I can then transfer some of these skills to my work and future projects.

I wanted to give a shout out to technotim and noted.lol who I've drawn a lot of inspiration from for a number of my services.

Full disclosure, I'm not one to write blogs so this is a bit of a challenge in itself. I've given myself a bit of license to be a keep things a bit rough as I write to keep myself motivated to continue to post regularly.

If you're interested feel free to read through my posts and head over to my docs