In the What are YOU self-hosting? thread, there are a lot of people here who are self-hosting a huge number of applications, but there’s not a lot of discussion of the platform these things run on.
What does your self-hosted infrastructure look like?
Here are some examples of more detailed questions, but I’m sure there are plenty more topics that would be interesting:
- What hardware do you run on? Or do you use a data center/cloud?
- Do you use containers or plain packages?
- Orchestration tools like K8s or Docker Swarm?
- How do you handle logs?
- How about updates?
- Do you have any monitoring tools you love?
- Etc.
I’m starting to put together the beginning of my own homelab, and I’ll definitely be starting small but I’m interested to hear what other people have done with their setups.
I would probably not do what I do.
I have two machines that host everything I use, a Thinkpad x220 (i5-2540M, 8GB RAM) which lives on the floor near my router, and an RPI4 (4GB) which lives next to my router on the table. Which one does what usually is dictated by what machine I happen to SSH into. The RPI4 is attached to an 8TB Easystore I originally bought to shuck but didn’t, and wears a NAS hat. Soon-ish I’ll probably get some extra drives and set up a “proper” server which is less trepidatious.
I run almost everything I use in containers, and Podman is my container engine of choice. Originally it was because Fedora made me, but now I am a big Podman fan.
Logging and updates are not something I like to talk about because I handle both poorly, and normally just let her rip. I do updates weekly or so whenever I get around to it, but logs are a wasteland. I’d like to get a good monitoring system set up, but for me it feels like way more work than running the things I actually want and use, so I usually end up just letting them accumulate on the disk and grep them whenever I need to.