It’s your home environment. You want it to be easy. You want to use the tools you run not maintain them. If you want to learn k8 for professional growth, learn it separately from a home server.
Your home server can be more pet than cattle.
I've been moving workloads to an old gaming rig running NixOS with varying levels of isolation (some containers, but really just good user/group/permissions management), and it runs super well.
Of course, you could do the same with just Docker Compose and no Swarm, and I think you'd still be better off than using Swarm.
The main reasons swarm is better than other options for clustering IMO is networking. They can be set up to share the ports on all devices and map it back to the correct container on whatever host it’s on, so you can disconnect the target IP:Port from the container.
As far as disaster is concerned, it's not that difficult to install software that really needs minimal maintenance. But it comes down to what you want out of the software and hardware that you run.
There’s only one and it changes manually as I need features to change. I download and install things as needed, from gui, with no version control or script to manage it. It’s a pet.
Yes absolutely. I can afford a new one, and I would immediately buy a new one (well I’m already waiting for the newly released one but still). I would still be quite upset and my life would be interrupted at least a little.
I took the pet/cattle analogy to be about how manual the setup is, and how replaceable it is. I think apple has smartly blurred that line with great backup tech, but I would still consider the “lovingly” hand customized aspect of maintaining a phone solidly a pet. Some version of my current phone has been around for ~10 years through various hardware iterations, all restarted from a backup image. I would be distraught if i had to recreate it without a backup, just finding my apps, logging in, finding wallpaper, rearranging icons, setting up shortcuts, etc. Maybe that’s the ideal state for a home server - a nearly no-op backup and restart process that you still manage as you need
If you want to try out <insert tech here> to learn something, then just learn it, don’t try to fit it in your normal life and eat at your existing stuff. Don’t replace your mac with a chrome book just because you’re learning webdev, and don’t replace your home server with terraform just because you’re learning it. What if you learn it but stop needing it or never use it professionally? You’ll now need to maintain that skill to maintain something at home.
If you want something more than a blank Linux box for your home server, check out HASS.io, synology, QNAP, TrueNAS, or one of the many “hold your hands” distros/tools designed to make it less work. Even Portainer/Proxmox will give you a bit of a GUI without being too opinionated. I use a blank Linux box primarily, but only because I live with other SWEs who all want to mess with the shared server, and everyone wants their own thing and we couldn’t agree on anything else. We plan to switch to TrueNAS and give everyone a VM but haven’t coordinated the switch yet…