I've recently learned that "homelab" is a specific thing meaning you run certain software (like Proxmox), and not a generic term for running a 'server lab' at home.
It’s the SUV that has off-road tires but never leaves the pavement, the beginner guitarist with an arena-ready amp, the occasional cook with a $5k knife. No judgment, everyone should do what they want, but the discussions get very serious even though the stakes are low.
People will build a huge multinode cluster in their basement with Raspberry PIs, and benchmark it to point out performance issues that they absolutely can't live with and so they are off to buy new SSDs or whatever. It's a hobby, but it's shaped like someone's actual job.
Which are all pretty useful considering my day job is a software engineer.
Many of these things have been directly applicable at work, e.g. when something weird happens in AWS, or we have a project using obscure Docker features.
but proxmox and kubernetes are overkill, imo, for most homelab setups. setting them up is a good learning experience but not necessarily an appropriate architecture for maintaining a few mini PCs in a closet long term.
you can ignore the gatekeeping.
proxmox is great, though. It's worth running it even if you treat it as nothing more than a BMC.
There’s a lot of overlap between “I run a server to store my photos” and “I run a bunch of servers for fun”, which has resulted in annoying gatekeeping (or reverse gatekeeping) where people tell each other they are “doing it wrong”, but on Reddit at least it’s somewhat being self-organized into r/selfhosted and r/homelab, respectively.
It's funny. I did this (before it really became a more mainstream hobby, this was early 00s), but now that I work in ops I barely even want to touch a computer after work.
You know when you know.
I personally enjoy the big machines (I've also always enjoyed meaninglessly large benchmark numbers on gaming hardware) and enterprise features, redundancy etc. (in other words, over-engineering).
I know others really enjoy playing with K8s, which is its own rabbit hole.
My main goal - apart from the truly useful core services - is to learn something new. Sometimes it's applicable to work (I am indeed an SWE larping as a sysadmin, as another commenter called out :-) ), sometimes it's not.
I’ve had one or two machines running serving stuff at home for a couple decades [edit: oh god, closer to 2.5 decades…], including serving public web sites for a while, and at no point would I have thought the term “home lab” was a good label for what I was doing.
I’d classify myself in the former camp, with a small server that runs TrueNAS and serves media, runs VMs and a few apps I use for work - and a Unifi network for my home and security cameras and VPN.
I’m positive there are people with very similar setups who call it a homelab. I don’t really experiment with mine, it’s set up and works in the background for months on end.
Surely people have had ‘homelabs’ for longer than VMs and container have been mainstream?
http://www.trygve.com/servers_quarters.html
http://www.trygve.com/house.html (scroll down)