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Looking to build a K8s cluster, what are your strategies for finding affordable hardware? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 weeks ago by Eldaroth@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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I currently run all my self-hosted apps either on Podman in a VM or in LXCs on Proxmox. For hardware, I'm using a Chinese-made mini computer with an Intel N150 and 16GB of DDR5 RAM that I bought before the whole AI hype started. I also have a Synology NAS that I use mainly for media and photo storage.

I've been thinking about tinkering with Kubernetes in my homelab for a while now (I already use it extensively at work, so I'm quite familiar with it), and I started looking around for used hardware to use as bare metal nodes. Nothing fancy—I'm looking for 1 or 2 mini servers or SFF with at least 16GB of memory and a decent CPU (4–6 cores). But with current prices, even decently priced used hardware (~200–250€) is quite difficult to find in Europe, and most of it is HP stuff with Lenovo being a rare breed around here. I won't even get started on newly bought hardware...

If you've bought hardware in this market recently, how did it go for you? Or are most of you holding out for now, waiting for better times?

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[–] paulcdb@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I’m also in the PI 4 group. Its worth watching ebay, etc for people selling pi clusters. I picked up my 8 node 4GB pi cluster fairly cheap.

Also if you’re learning and find yourself struggling with yaml files, I found Claude helped a lot to get running. Create the file, dump it into Claude and let it re-output the file. Give it the error log helps if it gets stuck.

Also if you explain your cluster setup, I built mine with Talos Linux so setup VIP, etc and it’s pretty good at generating a working setup.

I’m not a huge fan of AI but I struggled with yaml formatting so it might suck for a lot of stuff but formatting stuff properly is great.. that and scanning logs for errors! 😎

[–] Eldaroth@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

I liked my Pi 3B+ for tinkering around and run some services like vaultwarden or a VPN node with PiVPN (first OpenVPN, later Wireguard). They are great for stuff like that and don't use much power. Not sure it makes sense to add them as nodes though as 2GB is stretching it, although Talos OS has a minimal requirement for worker nodes of 1GB, so I might still try 😄

As you can see I plan to use Talos as well, it sounds really promising what I read about it. For a CNI I plan to use Cilium and for distributed storage I might try Longhorn and see how it works. Apart from that I am still on the fence if I should run my nodes bare model or put a virt layer in between with Proxmox.