My first machine in my re-homing IT infrastructure was an OrangePi. I created a single-node #k3s cluster and started moving services to it (initially my Diaspora pod and a few others). I tweaked Dockerfiles to create cross-platform images (usually this required no change at all), and by and large it worked great.

I’m looking to add some more nodes, and I discovered the Mini PC category. A node that looks promising is the BosGame B100. For $180 you get a machine with a pretty good CPU (Alder Lake N100), RAM (16GB), and NVMe SSD (512GB). It’s amd64 instead of arm64, but again, my images are all cross-platform and the scheduler can deploy them on whatever is more available.

Adding nodes to the cluster is super-simple, and they need very little administration since they run basically Debian and everything else is behind a container interface.

Migrating home becomes little more than moving the data, updating some DNS entries, and applying the same configuration against the new cluster. So much simpler than the bad old days where everything ran on the underlying OS.