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> why go through all the trouble of setting this up instead of just using AWS.

Because you may want to have control over your hardware, your costs, your network, your software. AWS and most cloud providers are very expensive and mostly lock you in (unless you only use EC2 instances as VM, in which case you are getting terrible value for what you pay). I already have computers and an ISP, so why would I want to rent someone else’s?

The point is either to learn some new stuff in a semi-practical environment or build an environment where you can host things that are impractical to host in the cloud. Things like home assistant or whatever.

If you are doing anything with infrastructure than finding a place with Ansible or Nomad would be:

Ansible - Deploying VMs on-prem and in the cloud, creating a managed-k8s cluster in the cloud, deploying k8s on-prem, possibly bare-metal server provisioning. Configuration of resources for all of the above.

Nomad - Alternative to K8s from Hashicorp (supposed to be simpler, I wouldn't know as I've never used it).

Tailscale - VPN provider

Where would you use these tools your day-to-day? If you aren't deploying VMs, containers, bare-metal servers, or making configurations to the above - you would probably be looking to pick these tech stacks up as a hobby.

Resources - While I always check the sources first, I'm not a fan of the Ansible getting started docs. The list I run down for resources after the source (based on cost and quality)

- Online resources provided by a local library - was able to find a good Java reference for a recent project.

- Getting started books ( your OReillys, Manning Pub, Starch Press, etc)

- MOOCs

- Pluralsight, LinkedIn Learning ,etc.

- Youtube - CodeCamp, etc

I'm running a similar setup, but with k3s on Raspberry Pis and an old Mac Mini. For me it's about running home automation workloads (that should stay in the LAN) as well as learning and experimenting with devops tooling, currently working on managing everything with Ansible as well, still not sure whether to use a k3s role from Ansible Galaxy or just k3sup (anyone got a recommendation?) and running one of the k3s nodes on a Raspberry Pi robot I was gifted for Christmas, mainly because I can.

If I did the same on AWS I'd pay a big lot more and that'd cut into budgets for other pastimes. Also I wouldn't get to tinker with hardware and do some of the more exotic things like exposing GPIO pins to Kubernetes workloads, and if I ran home automation workloads there, they'd be useless if my uplink fails.

But if this was work, I'd do things differently for sure.

> why go through all the trouble of setting this up instead of just using AWS

1. Have you ever hosted something on AWS, for public consumption by parties not under your control, where you, personally were footing the bill?

2. Have you ever hosted something on AWS where a misconfiguration on your side and/or upset/impatient customer caused a bill so large that you had to shut the company down?

AWS will scale to fill your bank balance, irregardless of whether you can afford to pay for that scale. AWS is great for elasticity when you can afford to pay.

AWS has no functional bill limits, even after 10 years. For those who post a link to the AWS bill limits havn't actually handled any meaningful scale, at which point a set of dedicated servers is great value.

"Some people build things because they like building things." -- Zuck

> why go through all the trouble of setting this up instead of just using AWS

I will never understand that mentality. Maybe I always was to poor to pay for the cloud but a bunch of old notebooks, electricity a switch and internet is all you need to experiment and self-host. AWS is powerful if you need to scale but for homelab/experiments it's overkill - today I'd rather get an Oracle Cloud free account that gets you 24gb ram / 4 arm cores and 200gb storage and ipv4/ipv6 addresses, internal subnets for free to experiment if you need cloud.

> What would be the best place to learn all of this

Your homelab ;)

On, even better, you use a bash script or a little bit of Python.

Ansible is a lot of python that's already been written, battle tested, and made available to use. Once you get beyond one box or need to deploy and tweak something more than once, getting an ansible config setup is much easier in the long run.

> Ansible is a lot of python

One more reason to stay away from it. The codebase is very complex and the issues labeled "bug" count more than 18 thousands!

The language is a kludge of yaml and jinja with custom chunks of Python that is much less expressive than pure Python.

Go ahead and downvote at will.

it’s an entirely usable system that can be used as shell script replacements to full virtual machine provisioning.

it does not matter if the language is a “kludge” if it suits the purpose. Ansible suits a lot of purposes and is worth exploring as a free technology.

...and dropbox is just an rsync script, Google docs is just vim/emacs (delete as appropriate) over ssh, and FF VII is just a doom clone /s

Ansible gives a framework that covers several of the gotchas your bash + python hack would run into.