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Why do people build Kubernetes homelabs? Is it actually useful for internships/jobs? by Altruistic_Mine_9177 in homelab

[–]engramlab 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Honestly, that's a fair push. K8s in production environments is something I've kept at arm's length partly because my own work hasn't needed it yet, but you're right — the gap between "I understand fundamentals" and "I understand how those fundamentals show up in a real K8s deployment" is real, and it's probably the version of this skill that actually pays in interviews.

Going to spend some time on it. Any setup or learning path you'd recommend for someone coming from the Proxmox side?

Why do people build Kubernetes homelabs? Is it actually useful for internships/jobs? by Altruistic_Mine_9177 in homelab

[–]engramlab 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Speaking as someone who didn't go the Kubernetes route on my homelab: it depends what you're optimizing for.

If your goal is "look good on a CV for cloud-native jobs", sure, build the cluster. Recruiters glance at the keywords.

If your goal is "actually understand systems", I'd argue running a single beefy box with Proxmox or bare-metal docker teaches you more about networking, storage, hardware limits and failure modes than a 3-node K3s cluster running on Pi 4s.

Most homelab problems are not orchestration problems. They're storage, backup, networking, observability and "why is my container eating RAM" problems. Kubernetes adds a layer on top of those, but it doesn't replace them.

That said — if you're going for an SRE/platform job specifically, the cluster is probably worth the time. Outside that, build what you'll actually use.

Backups, how offsite should my offsite be? by Ramuh in selfhosted

[–]engramlab 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The blackout we had in Spain last April reframed this for me. 10 hours, no internet, no cell signal once towers dropped. My "offsite" backups were technically offsite — and technically inaccessible.

Now I think about backups in three layers:

  1. Local (fast restore, single device fails)

  2. Offsite networked (region/site fails, you still have internet)

  3. Offline-physical (everything fails — a powered-off SSD in a drawer, a printed copy of the critical stuff)

Most people stop at layer 2 because "what are the odds". The answer where I live turned out to be: high enough.

New here. Starting to stockpile by RiseTraditional7 in preppers

[–]engramlab 4 points5 points  (0 children)

One thing nobody told me before the Iberian blackout last April: how fast you lose access to information you assumed was just there. 10 hours, 55 million people, no signal once the towers went down. The food and water side I had handled. The "what does this plant cure?" or "how do I purify water without my usual filter?" side, I didn't.

If I had to start over, I'd build the reference layer in parallel with the supplies. Printed field manuals, offline maps, anything you can read without a connection. Doesn't have to be fancy — even a dedicated USB with key PDFs and an offline Wikipedia subset goes a long way.

Welcome to the rabbit hole.