I’ve been planning out what I want to build in my homelab, and the possibilities are… endless. Exciting and mildly overwhelming at the same time. Here’s where I finally landed: I’m using a Lenovo ThinkPad L13 Yoga (i3-10110U, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD) running Ubuntu as the base for a K3s cluster. Not exactly a data center powerhouse, but perfect for learning Kubernetes fundamentals without smoking my electric bill. The Project Goal I’ve got a Google Nest (Gen 3) thermostat, and I want to pull real-world energy data out of it to analyze: - How often the furnace or AC runs - Average indoor temps - Seasonal patterns - Whether this thing is actually saving me money or just looks fancy Like I said, the laptop will be the cluster running multiple pods, and I plan to visualize everything in Grafana. I’ll figure out the guts in between. I learn best by doing — and doing something that actually interests me. IMO, this beats wandering through a course without a purpose. The Plan - FastAPI microservice to fetch & normalize Nest data - Store data in Postgres - Deploy everything in K3s (Deployments, Services, Ingress) - Visualize with Grafana - (Eventually) automate deployments via GitHub Actions → K3s Thoughts?

Home labs teach you a lot of things, but miss some other things. What if there were "community labs", focusing on "home lab" blindspots? Would you participate? Like navigating legacy systems, coordinating across dysfunctional teams, managing hundreds of interdependent resources, debugging production incidents under pressure, making architectural trade-offs with incomplete information, technical debt, and human factors.

Hi everyone, I am curious to know what members, who have been through the program and landed their first role in DevOps, approached their job search: - which roles did you prioritize and why? - did you prepare for a technical interview, even though it turned into a conversation about your homelab? - how did you handle imposter syndrome - if applicable? Thank you for sharing. I'm nowhere near that phase, but curious to learn.

Hello everyone! I recently started building my homelab. Right now I only have Linkding running behind Nginx as a reverse proxy via Docker. I’m pretty happy with it so far and I’m planning to add more tools over time. My current idea is to learn a tech stack first, then integrate it directly into my homelab. I expect to break things eventually and I actually see it as a valuable way to learn. I was thinking about setting up Kubernetes early so I don’t have to deal with it later. But for the learning process, is it better to run a few services with Docker first, then integrate Kubernetes on top and fix whatever breaks along the way? I feel like that might teach me more, even if it gets messier. For those who’ve gone through this: how did your homelabs start? What did you do when you were just starting from scratch? I’d love to hear your journey and what helped you learn the most!

What is the best setup for homeLab ? Servers or mini pcs ? How many servers and mini pcs are required and cost estimation ?