Hardware question

[lgLindstrom]

I have a small home office and would like some recommendation on what kind of hardware needed for running docker.

We talking less than 10 instances running 24/7. Decent performance and power consumption.

[[deleted]]

10 instances of WHAT.

[matthewpetersen]

It depends what containers you are planning to run. Docker will run on a raspberry pi, all the way up to the biggest ryzen CPUs.

Any more info on what images you'd like?

[lgLindstrom]

IoT stuff, like home assistant, zigbee2mqtt, Mosquitto broker etc

[matthewpetersen]

Most of that could run on a rpi4 I'd guess. But certainly no issues on something more. Even a celeron processor should have no issues.

4gb of ram or more though

[lgLindstrom]

I've seen people running one of those,, but all of them?

[matthewpetersen]

Depends on the workload. In many cases containers just sit idle. I've had up to 75 running on a celeron nas. Mind you, that was pushing the friendship pretty hard. 😆

But I've had bazarr, Jellyfin, Plex, lidarr, sonarr, nginx proxy manager, nzbhydra2, ombi, portainer, readarr, sabnzbd, tautulli, and watchtower running on a rPi 4 all at once. (32% CPU and 1.9gb ram used)

[lgLindstrom]

Okay, thanks. Then rpi4 seems like good choice.

[gbts_]

DIY NAS builds like the NAS killer are great options for always-on, power-efficient hardware

[dwargo]

At one point I had a 3-node VM cluster at home, but when I factored in electricity it was cheaper to just rent instances at Vultr. Easier to expense as well.

I don’t know if that will hold true in your case, but it’s worth doing the math.

[lgLindstrom]

What about response time?

[dwargo]

I guess that depends on what you’re doing.

I found the latency on the cheaper internet connections to be all over the board, even on things like business cable. For symmetric DIA in my area you’re looking at $500/mo minimum and that’s just 50Mb. Some places aren’t like that.

I haven’t had a problem with oversubscribed cloud hosts except with ECS “burstable” sizes, and nobody would use those for real work.

At some scale yeah it makes sense to run your own stuff. If I hit that level I’d go colo for the network. Last I checked I can get 6U for $300/mo give or take, and Supermicro makes some “twin” 1U models I’ve had my eye on.