A penguin made me do it
In January 2021 I had a talk with myself and we agreed that I needed a change. As I moved to a new city, I thought it was the perfect time to do something new, and so I did. I spent a couple of months exploring what was beyond my comfort zone and, eventually, I found myself thinking about a career change.
There was a penguin whispering in my ear…
T: You always liked Linux! Why don’t you go and find a job where you can do some Linux-Fu?
M: How? There are so many technologies out there that I never used!
T: Build a homelab!
That penguin was right. I should have given the homelab idea a go, so in April 2021 I bought an old PC that I would use for my homelab, and my adventure began.
Since I was absolutely new to the game, I spent quite some time gathering information about building and managing a homelab. Videos, blog posts, various documentation… I thought I had to spin up some VMs and start playing, but how? There were so many options, and I started feeling overwhelmed. That’s the moment when you have to keep going, otherwise you end up doing nothing. So, eventually I bumped into what would become my first hypervisor: ProxmoxVE.
I installed Proxmox on my new machine, and I started the studying process.
The revelation
After downloading the Ubuntu Server ISO, it was time to spin up my first virtual machine in my homelab. Fortunately Proxmox is pretty easy to use, so creating a VM is a smooth experience, but once it was done, I felt lost.
I didn’t know what to do, what to install, what to learn. I was looking for ideas on the web for days, until I found something called Pi-hole. I thought it would be cool to start with something like this, because it can also serve my home network. In that particular moment I realised why I was having troubles finding ideas! I was so focused on this concept of the homelab as a learning tool that I forgot it doesn’t have just that purpose. That was a game changer.
I could learn new things while actually implementing them in a real life situation. Since that moment, looking for new projects was so easy and fun. I couldn’t wait to start something new, implementing a new feature, or even just opening up the shell and make sure everything was running fine.
VMs are good, but containers are better
During my journey, I spun up few VMs, and soon I ran out of resources (mainly RAM) so I was looking for a solution. The solution was Docker. I’m not going into details, so, if you don’t know what containerisation is, take a look at this. Because I wanted to learn as much as I could, I installed Docker in one of my VM and started messing around.
I remember that at first, it was a weird experience, most likely because I was still learning the basics, but the more confident I became, the more containers I ended up spinning. Long story short, every application running in a VM was then moved in a Docker Container. It helped me save a lot of resources and, at the same time, it set my mindset to: if I can run it in a container, I will!
A new beginning
After a couple of months, my homelab adventure with Proxmox, few VMs and Docker, came to its end.
Sad? Not really, because I was hungry for improvement! I decided to rebuild my homelab on top of a different hypervisor. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t have any issue with Proxmox, I just wanted something more known in the industry: VMware ESXi. Once installed and ready to go, I created a VM to serve me with Docker, set up all the containers I needed and start another chapter of this adventure.
I was so excited, motivated, and, more important, I had a plan!
But this is another story…