Cloud Native Home Lab

For an engineer who spent the last ten years fully in the cloud, the prospect of dealing with real, physical hardware again is daunting! How exactly does PXE work again, and why in the world is it using TFTP? Once I have an Ubuntu server running, how should I get my application running on it?

Many of the systems and tools we rely upon in the cloud can work just as well on physical servers, and even when you only have one Linux box! In fact, it's a wonderful way to try out new technology and get a deeper understanding of the key components, protocols, and architectures we take for granted every day!

This talk will break down why you'd want to manage a home lab, and then deep dive into one potential implementation. We'll discuss the different challenges you'll need to solve, from provisioning new hosts to saving configuration and secrets. Given the excitement and momentum from the Cloud Native community, we'll be able to use these new tools in exciting ways, and dive into MaaS, k3s, and most importantly, how to monitor and observe it. By the end of this talk, you'll be able to set up a similar cluster and leverage these tools in fun and exciting ways!