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Comment by bmelton | Hacker News Reader

I've been thinking about that article for the past week so much that I've been looking at $250 Ryzen 7 5700U 16/512/2.5G Ace Magician NUCs to move some of my properties to. They're known to be shipping spyware on their Windows machines, but my thought was that I'd get 3 of them, clear them out with Debian, and set them up as a k8s cluster and have enough horsepower to handle postgres at scale.

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Get NUC, or one of those refurbished Dell or HP mini PCs. They have plenty of CPU power, consume very little idle power, and friendly to Linux.

I have been wildly happy with my EliteDesk mini pcs. Mine are the “G5” generation which cost like $60-150 on eBay with varying specs, obviously newer generations have better specs but for my “homelab” needs these have been great. I even put a discrete GPU ($60) in my AMD one for a great little Minecraft machine for playing with the kid.

I have a g5 elitedesk small form factor (about the size of a largr cereal box, not a book) pc, thats been runnimg my by media server and torrent download services for years now. It has a plucky little 10th gen i3 or something, and it has been more than enough. Can real time transcode 4K movies! Dead quiet and sips electricity. Uptime is on average about 8-10 months.

Glad it resonated with you!

If you're considering k8s, take a look at Kamal (also from DHH): https://kamal-deploy.org/

I think it makes more sense for small clusters.

It probably does! Kamal/MRSK has been on the roadmap for awhile. I have deliberately endeavored to keep the existing k8s setup as minimal as possible, and it's still grown to almost unruly. That said, it works well enough across the (surprisingly power efficient) Dell C1100s in the basement, so it'd take a migration to justify, which is of course the last thing you can justify this with.

Which k8s distribution are you using? I’ve been using k3s on everything from individual home machines or cloud VMs, to small on-premise customer clusters for customers who don’t already have their own k8s clusters.

I don’t find it approaching unruliness, quite the opposite really.

Vanilla, CNCF. K3S is tempting.

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