I have a real lab that is 12 beefy servers in various data centers. My home lab is a smaller version of that which is only 5 not-so-beefy servers. I test all o

I have a real lab that is 12 beefy servers in various data centers. My home lab is a smaller version of that which is only 5 not-so-beefy servers. I test all of the things I want to try there before making them somewhat permanent in my data center. I currently have 5 openstack environments because I wanted to test rapid iteration of those environments. They are all publicly accessible thanks to a /25 I have on my home network. And since it’s my home network I have to maintain some sort of a production stance otherwise the end users will get uppity. So just like in the datacenter, I have a “production” network that is highly available and runs all of the 24/7 services for my house (home automation, file server, etc) I run all the services you would expect a cloud to offer.. vm workloads, container workloads, serverless functions, orchestration, managed services for things like Java servlets, MySQL or Postgres, s3 layer, web based office apps, Kanban, project mgmt, etc. This all started as a hobby project to learn software features or experiment enterprise ideas outside of work. I flipped it into a side-gig a decade ago. Adding the side-gig experience to my resume 3x’d my salary over the past decade. The income from services technically made that 4x. I no longer host services and the servers sit 90% idle. They are technically paid for for the next decade but I keep it around in case others want a starting point..