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Comment by blauditore | Hacker News Reader

I'm stuck trying to understand what exactly a home lab is: Apparently a computer at home that has similarities with common production servers?

Here's my naive question: What is the point of a home lab, i.e. what makes it better than running stuff on the machine you're developing? I can see some advantages in networking applications (as mentioned in the article), but I have the impression this is not too critical for most applications and devs.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of building stuff like this, and will always be able to find an excuse to do it anyway. :)

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>what exactly a home lab

Its murky because there is a bit of backstory. There used to be a homeserver subreddit. The people running commercial heavy rack servers got fed up with the peasants and created homelab sub. Then overall quality & vibe in homeserver sub dipped so everyone migrated over to homelab. So now you've got everything under the sun that is at home and switched on 24/7 being called a "homelab". Leading understandably to people being confused about the term

>What is the point of a home lab

People do it for different reasons - "own your own data", learning (IaC/docker/kubernetes/networking). It's also quite empowering for experimentation. Most of these setups are running hypervisors. So creating a VM is a 20 second affair. That sort of blank slate is useful to me for dev work. Local gitlab server, local CI runners, local kubernetes cluster, postgres server. It's all there, free, fast, accessible and ignoring initial layout effectively free.

It's a server, so the goal is to have it run something you care about (whatever that may be) 24/7, not because you cannot live without it, but to get experience with administrating a server.

In contrast, your dev machine may need to be rebooted any time, or switched off if you leave for the weekend.

A second defining characteristic of a homelab is that part of the rationale for owning it is in order to tinker with it, to try out new software packages, to play with tools & concepts (VMs, containers, admin and remote admin tools, KVMs).

Ultimately, you may define a homelab as a "physical server setup for learning and for running personal services". Homelab operators may also take pride of the independence from large IT or cloud providers attained by operating their lab.

it's at least one server (_any_ computer that never turns off) hosting things you would use (and probably pay) on a day-to-day basis.

The most important point is to be available all the time in multiple devices that you own, that's why some folks don't want to do these things on their main machines. A laptop you could take it away, and your family at home would/could lose access to the things you're hosting. A beefy desktop might be a bit too power hungry to be on all the time.

It's a hobby. It doesn't need to have a point. It's kind of like playing games - it doesn't need to have a point, but it's enjoyable, and you get a community out of it.

Yeah, what exactly is Lego? Painting? Playing music? Model railroad? Ham radio?

It’s a place to learn while playing pretend. LARPing enterprise IT if you like. Why wonder what the point is?

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