I really have to disagree, if you're going the route of hosting stuff in your home, then by all means take an easy k8s distro like rancher. I have stuff running from openhab, Nextcloud to even my Unifi controller. It runs flawlessly; and together with Rook, I don't have to be afraid of node and disk failures. I haven't learned so much in 2 years since I started linux 20y ago.

Personally I think the amount of pain wasn't enough, so I'm using Canonical Maas, and I can just spin up extra servers, though going beyond 4 nodes seems kind of wasteful in a home setting. Though my rig seeps 100Watt, which for hobby purposes is okayish imo. I've been running this since Ubuntu 16.04 and upgrading to 18.04 has been a relative breeze compared to a situation where I would've built this using adhoc scripts(i.e. non-k8s setup.)

I did make a wireguard tunnel to a colocation datacenter for offsite backups using async mirroring of rook/ceph. B/c with so many moving parts and automation, wiping a cluster accidentally is quite possible.

Haha. I'm a little bit lacking in my "k8s ops" skills and hope to learn by practicing! Currently there isn't any serious "production" workload running on the k8s cluster. Perhaps if I become more comfortable with managing the k8s cluster, I will migrate my other services onto k8s. We'll see!

I had the same thought. I myself used LXD for my personal server and I can't regret enough.

Not that I dislike LXD, but a good configured server won't require many interventions. In my case, I was about to upgrade some guest SO, and I had to relearn lots of things and remember what I did, even why, after about two years without touching it.