I need

It's just fun to play with, there is no "need".

I need a kubernetes cluster with high availability, load balancing and horizontal pod autoscaling, because that is something I want to learn. I don't care that it's just for wife's home-made dog collars webshop.

Switched from a raspberry pi 3 to a second hand x86 thin client (lenovo thinkcentre m920q) because raspberry pi 4 were not available at the time. Made me learn proxmox and a bunch of other cool stuff my raspi couldn't handle.

I'm rooting for ARM / RISC-V to become more popular in desktop computing / servers though.

This struggle usually takes place over a weekend.

i think the best choice is a cheap used pc or laptop, or server. Reduces electric waste. I also host my own server on a 19 year old Dell Insprion 1300

A mini PC is a good middle ground. Mostly for the video transcode and machine learning power.

I think any mini-pc/old laptop is better, and probably cheaper than a raspberry pi nowadays

I've discovered that there are a lot of medium-tier software engineers who immediately will go straight to horizontal scaling (i.e: just throw hardware at it), and I've seen instances where very highly skilled engineers just write their code better, set things up on a bare metal server, cache things, etc. and manage with just a single badass server

I've found that a pi is good enough, computationally, but not reliability wise.

A lot of things like advanced light control goes through my host, so any lockups or crashes are bad. My pi held up for about 18 months before it began to play up. I've found a small NUC system has higher reliability for the same price and power usage.

See, I don't pay for the electric bill to keep my collection of old enterprise equipment running because I need the performance. I keep them running because I have no resistance to the power of blinkenlights.

Yup, a pi is enough for me.

Well... 5 Pis and an ancient NUC running proxmox are enough for me. And a DS920+... and an old laptop running docker are enough for me.

With Linux any old computer from yesteryear can become a quick server. That's what I do, just make sure you got backups.

I had to buy a lenovo thinkcentre mini because was cheaper than a brandnew raspberry pi.

I spend all day at work exploring the inside of the k8s sausage factory so I'm inured to the horrors and can fix basically anything that breaks. The way k8s handles ingress and service discovery makes it absolutely worth it to me. The fact that I can create an HTTPProxy and have external-dns automagically expose it via DNS is really nice. I never have to worry about port conflicts, and I can upgrade my shit whenever with no (or minimal) downtime, which is nice for smart home stuff. Most of what I run tends to be singleton statefulsets or single-leader deployments managed with leases, and I only do horizontal for minimal HA, not at all for perf. If something gives me more trouble running in HA than it does in singleton mode then it's being run as a singleton.

k8s is a complex system with priorities that diverge from what is ideal for usage at home, but it can be really nice. There are certain things that just get their own VM (Home Assistant is a big one) because they don't containerize/k8serize well though.

The only problem I've had with Raspberry Pi is that some apps want to write a lot of stuff to "disk", and the default "disk" on a Pi is a MicroSD card which dies if you keep writing things to it. Sure, you can always plug something into a USB slot, but that adds a bit of friction to the whole process.

Oh, also, I wish it were easy to power a whole bunch of Pi units. Each one needing its own wall wart is a bit annoying, and I've had iffy results using weaker, less steady power supplies with multiple ports intended for things like phones.

So close. Started on raspberry pi. Went for a cluster with dpckrt swarm. Finished with a nas and a 10years old game computer as a mediacenter. (That the electricity bill whoch made me stop the cluster)

Or you learn proxmox and running everything as a VM

Ha ha

Under-complicated -> over-complicated -> under-complicated.

There's a 'just right' that I think you skipped through.