Yeah, the overwhelming majority of the cost was SBCs that are way overboard for what seems to be the intended use of this thing as a "learning" tool. Could have

Yeah, the overwhelming majority of the cost was SBCs that are way overboard for what seems to be the intended use of this thing as a "learning" tool. Could have shaved $4,500+ off the price right in one whack. There are a few other places where some cost could be trivially shaved in that parts list too. What I like best about this project, besides it being in a G4 Cube, is that it's like a physical metaphor for Kubernetes. A classic monolith was cracked into a bunch of microservices which from the outside doesn't look like any kind of improvement over the original.