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The company I work for at the moment does a lot of work with k8s for government and enterprise, and several of my coworkers have home labs set up purely so they

The company I work for at the moment does a lot of work with k8s for government and enterprise, and several of my coworkers have home labs set up purely so they can test things across multiple specific versions of k8s, like upgrades, reproducing unusual bugs to figure out a solution for clients, etc. Personally I don’t have the hardware to do that myself, and I’m thinking I’d making a change in jobs anyway, but I have been building up personal storage and backup devices for storing/serving media. Got two RAID0 (YOLO!) NAS devices, one as the primary and another as a backup target. Not quite a lab, but after losing everything I owned a few years ago, it takes a while to rebuild. Another co worker has his home lab set up for VMware administration and testing across various versions and hardware configurations. It’s been a life saver for us too, since his knowledge was invaluable on a project back in October.

pc86 5y ago
Perhaps a dumb question but why are these folks spending their personal money building a personal lab in their home to do testing for work? Shouldn't their work be paying for all of this? I would never spend my own money for my employer in this way.
- grepfru_it 5y ago
  Sometimes they won’t but you still want to learn. In my case we only had 5 sun servers and they were our dns infra. We did not have any additional hardware for test nor were they paying for my aws account. Either I sit around and collect the same paycheck everyday or I spend $10 on a vps to learn in my spare time. End up using the dns solution to host some websites for people. Vps wasn’t powerful enough so I rented a dedicated server for $30 (still have it 13 years later). We started running VMware at work but again no hardware for testing. So I picked up another dedicated server to run my own hyper visor. Then I started selling VPS systems. That is how I turned a $10 vps my Job didn’t want to pay for into a $80k/yr business which led to big jumps in pay and titles as I took new jobs. You can sit at home and stick your nose up at the idea but then you are also not learning or pushing your career to the limits
908B64B197 5y ago
Hold on, they paid their own (post tax) dollars for this?
- MrWiffles 5y ago
  Honestly, I don't know who paid for it. I suspect that they're re-using hardware they've had laying around for a decade (maybe longer?), likely originally purchased of ebay from businesses upgrading their servers/racks/appliances and re-selling the old stuff. Whether or not the employer reimburses them for the privilege of their having that for company use, I have no idea and I've never asked. It's not my business. Besides, it's not like you can't use k8s on some old servers in a home lab for other things, too.

pc86 5y ago

Perhaps a dumb question but why are these folks spending their personal money building a personal lab in their home to do testing for work? Shouldn't their work be paying for all of this? I would never spend my own money for my employer in this way.

grepfru_it 5y ago
Sometimes they won’t but you still want to learn. In my case we only had 5 sun servers and they were our dns infra. We did not have any additional hardware for test nor were they paying for my aws account. Either I sit around and collect the same paycheck everyday or I spend $10 on a vps to learn in my spare time. End up using the dns solution to host some websites for people. Vps wasn’t powerful enough so I rented a dedicated server for $30 (still have it 13 years later). We started running VMware at work but again no hardware for testing. So I picked up another dedicated server to run my own hyper visor. Then I started selling VPS systems. That is how I turned a $10 vps my Job didn’t want to pay for into a $80k/yr business which led to big jumps in pay and titles as I took new jobs. You can sit at home and stick your nose up at the idea but then you are also not learning or pushing your career to the limits

908B64B197 5y ago

Hold on, they paid their own (post tax) dollars for this?

MrWiffles 5y ago
Honestly, I don't know who paid for it. I suspect that they're re-using hardware they've had laying around for a decade (maybe longer?), likely originally purchased of ebay from businesses upgrading their servers/racks/appliances and re-selling the old stuff. Whether or not the employer reimburses them for the privilege of their having that for company use, I have no idea and I've never asked. It's not my business. Besides, it's not like you can't use k8s on some old servers in a home lab for other things, too.