5 ms·

Naming it does make it much easier to find community, resources, etc. A lack of nouns makes me poor google-fu. There does seem to be a blurry and moving line

by soneil 4y ago

Naming it does make it much easier to find community, resources, etc. A lack of nouns makes me poor google-fu. There does seem to be a blurry and moving line between "homelab" and "selfhosting" though, which doesn't help clarify things.

xoa 4y ago
Yeah, they're not strict terms. I personally think a significant differentiator though is that "homelab" tends to have a bit more emphasis on, well, the lab part. Ie., there is a certain amount of experimentation going on with some regularity. Beta software and firmware or even hardware, bleeding edge stuff, a higher tolerance for breaking things (and maybe leaving them broken for a bit when something else catches one's eye), etc. Some of the stuff attempted might not have any direct work requirement or value. It might be purely for fun and personal learning, and/or it might have some professional relation in terms of testing out new stuff in a initial way and kicking the tires before any kind of initial serious deployment. I mean, again there are certainly no hard and fast rules, but "homelab" settings often place more emphasis on dynamism than pure reliability, such as virtualizing things one normally wouldn't all on a single box. Virtual routing/firewall/edge and NAS are big examples to me that normally have their own dedicated hardware (be it on the metal or virtualized as part of one type of HA strat, but still dedicated). Whereas selfhosting is hosting, though by oneself. The big difference is the level of dependence, how much one requires the stuff being up to the extent if it isn't that's an immediate blocker on other work. In the same way one would typically expect a commercial host to be more focused on uptime, redundancy and overall lack of surprises, selfhosting tends to be more conservative, throw more hardware at a problem, invest more time and effort in polish and smoothing interaction with the wider world, etc. Basically the stuff you'd expect for something where "if this goes down on Friday my weekend is shot" vs "if this goes down on Friday eh maybe I'll poke at it Sunday night or next week sometime". Of course, one can also have both of these in the same home/SOHO/barn or whatever, just as businesses with decent IT will have some sort of minimal "lab" at least to do a bit of testing with before even getting to early staging. I myself am primarily on the selfhosting side of the spectrum at this point, but I do have a semi-isolated lab section as well where breaking world won't impact my work (nor result in upset family members!). No one right way to do it. Edit: also on topic, no I don't have a dashboard :). I've at times considered products like Prometheus/Grafana/Heimdall and I guess now there's another one I could look at here, but I've never really been able to justify it vs other stuff. They're often fairly heavy or seem to have side effects to worry about (including security, I like to keep dashboards and IPMI highly isolated on VLANs or their own independent physical network entirely), and while it could be pretty and satisfying my stuff tends to either be working or it's glaringly obvious something is broken since I depend on it, or if it's an emergency condition it's blaring notifications at my phone anyway. And same as commercial service dashboards, to me it seems like to really be an addition a dashboard would need a fairly independent chain from what it's monitoring. Otherwise if the core goes down the dashboard also drops too. That means more dedicated hardware, even if only something like an RPi. I could see a dashboard potentially being handy for unified monitoring of stats and softer errors, stuff that isn't an emergency itself but might be indicative of upcoming issues or issues with world (ISP always having problems at a certain time or failing to meet SLA say). But hasn't been truly compelling yet. Though sometimes the screenshots people put up make me quite tempted! Edit 2: upon a bit more reflection, non-technical stakeholders are a factor as well. Just because something is selfhosted doesn't mean it's for oneself only, on the contrary selfhosters having stuff for friends/family, or a group of neighbors in an apartment/dorm having some shared resources is a common use case. A decent dashboard could serve the purpose of giving others a feel for what's going on. Both in terms of understanding/reporting issues without having to go to the admin(s)(you), but also just plain seeing more of what they heck you're up to. A lot of infra stuff in particular can take a certain investment of time and money but not look like much on the outside. Selling others can be valuable in and of itself, humans overall are visual creatures.
- peteforde 4y ago
  I really appreciate this answer. Thanks for the thought-provocation. Self-hosting makes a lot of sense to me. I approve of its proper noun status. Homelab with an emphasis on testing out K8S or different configurations? Sure. It gets a pass. Sort of like how folks used to assemble their own Heathkit power supplies. Calling any desk that has a computer, tools and a few RasPis belonging to someone who is comfortable writing code a Homelab? Still icky. Still, everyone is free to use whatever terms they like. I’m going to finish up in my Plantlab, spend time in my Exerciselab and then go make a sandwich in my Calorielab.
  - xoa 4y ago
    It's a silly little topic but such relatively low stakes geeky discussion are definitely fun on a quiet HN Sunday (as I work to setup a new NAS unit as it happens), glad you found it interesting and a fun thing to contemplate a bit myself. I've believed in more local capabilities for various reasons (not least being in a rural area with crap internet promotes more on your own LAN), long before I heard the "homelab" term. I'm not on any of the sites that use it myself, but it didn't strike me as odd when I first encountered it either. >Calling any desk that has a computer, tools and a few RasPis belonging to someone who is comfortable writing code a Homelab? Still icky. Everyone starts somewhere! You can do a great deal with not much which is one of the magic things about tech these days. A few tools and RPis could be more power in some respects than state of the art facilities a couple decades ago. I think it's the spirit as much as anything, whether someone is digging and experimenting. And really don't forget our bubbles, for most people having a single RPi at all, let alone one dedicated to messing around with vs serving a specific purpose, would be unusual. And then if the bug bites them and they want to start going further, what term should be the umbrella under which they head down the 'ol rabbit hole? "Homelab" seems pretty on-point and innocuous? >I’m going to finish up in my Plantlab, spend time in my Exerciselab and then go make a sandwich in my Calorielab. Well, if you're actually breeding brand new experimental plants, inventing new exercises or probing the limits of your body with cutting edge bio monitoring/hacking, or spending lots of time coming up with new recipes then no matter how small scale by all means call those all $Xlabs! But by this terminology I think you might be more correct calling them your Selffarm, Selfgym, and Selfrestaurant if you're mostly using them to perform routines you're already practiced at and are interesting primarily in results... :p
Macha 4y ago
There certainly is a lot of overlap between the two. Homelab is a slightly older term, and has more of a hardware emphasis and makes me picture people with older enterprise gear (Dell R710s/R720s are perennial favorites among that group), older Cisco networking gear, actual server racks and VMWare based setups. Selfhosted is a bit more modern, and more software focused. More likely to be someone running a bunch of stuff on kubernetes across a bunch of Pis or an old desktop, with Unifi or Mikrotik networking gear
slightwinder 4y ago
From my understanding, homelab today is a subset of selfhosting, and means selfhosting where you have physical access to the hardware, so usually hosting at home. While Cloud-Hosting can be also selfhosted, but you usually use someone else hardware for it. And while the origins of each are a bit different, the usage today is in that way. We are long past the era were homelab only means experimentation and personal research at home.

by soneil 4y ago

xoa 4y ago

Yeah, they're not strict terms. I personally think a significant differentiator though is that "homelab" tends to have a bit more emphasis on, well, the lab part. Ie., there is a certain amount of experimentation going on with some regularity. Beta software and firmware or even hardware, bleeding edge stuff, a higher tolerance for breaking things (and maybe leaving them broken for a bit when something else catches one's eye), etc. Some of the stuff attempted might not have any direct work requirement or value. It might be purely for fun and personal learning, and/or it might have some professional relation in terms of testing out new stuff in a initial way and kicking the tires before any kind of initial serious deployment. I mean, again there are certainly no hard and fast rules, but "homelab" settings often place more emphasis on dynamism than pure reliability, such as virtualizing things one normally wouldn't all on a single box. Virtual routing/firewall/edge and NAS are big examples to me that normally have their own dedicated hardware (be it on the metal or virtualized as part of one type of HA strat, but still dedicated). Whereas selfhosting is hosting, though by oneself. The big difference is the level of dependence, how much one requires the stuff being up to the extent if it isn't that's an immediate blocker on other work. In the same way one would typically expect a commercial host to be more focused on uptime, redundancy and overall lack of surprises, selfhosting tends to be more conservative, throw more hardware at a problem, invest more time and effort in polish and smoothing interaction with the wider world, etc. Basically the stuff you'd expect for something where "if this goes down on Friday my weekend is shot" vs "if this goes down on Friday eh maybe I'll poke at it Sunday night or next week sometime". Of course, one can also have both of these in the same home/SOHO/barn or whatever, just as businesses with decent IT will have some sort of minimal "lab" at least to do a bit of testing with before even getting to early staging. I myself am primarily on the selfhosting side of the spectrum at this point, but I do have a semi-isolated lab section as well where breaking world won't impact my work (nor result in upset family members!). No one right way to do it. Edit: also on topic, no I don't have a dashboard :). I've at times considered products like Prometheus/Grafana/Heimdall and I guess now there's another one I could look at here, but I've never really been able to justify it vs other stuff. They're often fairly heavy or seem to have side effects to worry about (including security, I like to keep dashboards and IPMI highly isolated on VLANs or their own independent physical network entirely), and while it could be pretty and satisfying my stuff tends to either be working or it's glaringly obvious something is broken since I depend on it, or if it's an emergency condition it's blaring notifications at my phone anyway. And same as commercial service dashboards, to me it seems like to really be an addition a dashboard would need a fairly independent chain from what it's monitoring. Otherwise if the core goes down the dashboard also drops too. That means more dedicated hardware, even if only something like an RPi. I could see a dashboard potentially being handy for unified monitoring of stats and softer errors, stuff that isn't an emergency itself but might be indicative of upcoming issues or issues with world (ISP always having problems at a certain time or failing to meet SLA say). But hasn't been truly compelling yet. Though sometimes the screenshots people put up make me quite tempted! Edit 2: upon a bit more reflection, non-technical stakeholders are a factor as well. Just because something is selfhosted doesn't mean it's for oneself only, on the contrary selfhosters having stuff for friends/family, or a group of neighbors in an apartment/dorm having some shared resources is a common use case. A decent dashboard could serve the purpose of giving others a feel for what's going on. Both in terms of understanding/reporting issues without having to go to the admin(s)(you), but also just plain seeing more of what they heck you're up to. A lot of infra stuff in particular can take a certain investment of time and money but not look like much on the outside. Selling others can be valuable in and of itself, humans overall are visual creatures.

peteforde 4y ago
I really appreciate this answer. Thanks for the thought-provocation. Self-hosting makes a lot of sense to me. I approve of its proper noun status. Homelab with an emphasis on testing out K8S or different configurations? Sure. It gets a pass. Sort of like how folks used to assemble their own Heathkit power supplies. Calling any desk that has a computer, tools and a few RasPis belonging to someone who is comfortable writing code a Homelab? Still icky. Still, everyone is free to use whatever terms they like. I’m going to finish up in my Plantlab, spend time in my Exerciselab and then go make a sandwich in my Calorielab.
- xoa 4y ago
  It's a silly little topic but such relatively low stakes geeky discussion are definitely fun on a quiet HN Sunday (as I work to setup a new NAS unit as it happens), glad you found it interesting and a fun thing to contemplate a bit myself. I've believed in more local capabilities for various reasons (not least being in a rural area with crap internet promotes more on your own LAN), long before I heard the "homelab" term. I'm not on any of the sites that use it myself, but it didn't strike me as odd when I first encountered it either. >Calling any desk that has a computer, tools and a few RasPis belonging to someone who is comfortable writing code a Homelab? Still icky. Everyone starts somewhere! You can do a great deal with not much which is one of the magic things about tech these days. A few tools and RPis could be more power in some respects than state of the art facilities a couple decades ago. I think it's the spirit as much as anything, whether someone is digging and experimenting. And really don't forget our bubbles, for most people having a single RPi at all, let alone one dedicated to messing around with vs serving a specific purpose, would be unusual. And then if the bug bites them and they want to start going further, what term should be the umbrella under which they head down the 'ol rabbit hole? "Homelab" seems pretty on-point and innocuous? >I’m going to finish up in my Plantlab, spend time in my Exerciselab and then go make a sandwich in my Calorielab. Well, if you're actually breeding brand new experimental plants, inventing new exercises or probing the limits of your body with cutting edge bio monitoring/hacking, or spending lots of time coming up with new recipes then no matter how small scale by all means call those all $Xlabs! But by this terminology I think you might be more correct calling them your Selffarm, Selfgym, and Selfrestaurant if you're mostly using them to perform routines you're already practiced at and are interesting primarily in results... :p

Macha 4y ago

There certainly is a lot of overlap between the two. Homelab is a slightly older term, and has more of a hardware emphasis and makes me picture people with older enterprise gear (Dell R710s/R720s are perennial favorites among that group), older Cisco networking gear, actual server racks and VMWare based setups. Selfhosted is a bit more modern, and more software focused. More likely to be someone running a bunch of stuff on kubernetes across a bunch of Pis or an old desktop, with Unifi or Mikrotik networking gear

slightwinder 4y ago

From my understanding, homelab today is a subset of selfhosting, and means selfhosting where you have physical access to the hardware, so usually hosting at home. While Cloud-Hosting can be also selfhosted, but you usually use someone else hardware for it. And while the origins of each are a bit different, the usage today is in that way. We are long past the era were homelab only means experimentation and personal research at home.