Good article. There are so many homelab possibilities, with so many different levels of experimentation intended. >Software deployment and orchestration is to

Good article. There are so many homelab possibilities, with so many different levels of experimentation intended. >Software deployment and orchestration is too much about abstraction and "black boxes". So true, what are the alternatives, and how do you know if they are any good without trying them out? OTOH, some (usually dangerous) things are often advised "don't try this at home" :) Analogously I think some of the times what software pros call a "homelab" is so they can try things that might be too "dangerous" if they tried it at their employer. >what equipment should I start with? I think you answered your own question, "affordable" :) I would add, so affordable that you can acquire duplicate hardware. Then while emulating a "modern" dev environment at home like you have in mind, also in parallel build a functional equivalent from the ground up based on bare metal using the duplicate hardware without black boxes at all. See where those converge ;)