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Looking to build a K8s cluster, what are your strategies for finding affordable hardware? (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I currently run all my self-hosted apps either on Podman in a VM or in LXCs on Proxmox. For hardware, I'm using a Chinese-made mini computer with an Intel N150 and 16GB of DDR5 RAM that I bought before the whole AI hype started. I also have a Synology NAS that I use mainly for media and photo storage.

I've been thinking about tinkering with Kubernetes in my homelab for a while now (I already use it extensively at work, so I'm quite familiar with it), and I started looking around for used hardware to use as bare metal nodes. Nothing fancy—I'm looking for 1 or 2 mini servers or SFF with at least 16GB of memory and a decent CPU (4–6 cores). But with current prices, even decently priced used hardware (~200–250€) is quite difficult to find in Europe, and most of it is HP stuff with Lenovo being a rare breed around here. I won't even get started on newly bought hardware...

If you've bought hardware in this market recently, how did it go for you? Or are most of you holding out for now, waiting for better times?

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[–] [S] 3 points 3 months ago

Oh wow okay, if I'd go down that route I would definitely do multiple VMs on that host. In my opinion, the whole clustering and self healing / HA aspect of Kubernetes is why I want to switch to it. I can do gitops with Podman/Docker as well, in fact I already do that including a renovate pipeline on my sel-hosted Forgejo instance. But having the redundancy of several nodes, if one goes down the service will still work or at least will be re-deployed within a couple of seconds, provided there is distributed storage (longhorn, ceph or even nfs cis) if its a stateful app.

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