State of Self Hosting 2024

My new plans for my hobby for this year

I know that I have written about this previously on this blog, but I think everybody goes through their own cycles of highs and lows. Personally, there’s been a lot more lows as of late. Things for the most part of this year have not been feeling amazing, primarily due to events in work. When you have a hobby that is closely related to your work, things can suffer when that compartmentalisation starts to fail. And other things going on in my life meant that generally, things were quite sad feeling.

But, as ever, the cycle began to change and I started to feel better about things and in particular, self hosting. I needed new plans and ideas for what this hobby is meant to do for me, besides burning a hole in my wallet. Trying to be not afraid of making decisions too is another thing that has to change. I truly wish to improve my software writing skills and to launch more products under my business. I wish to stop talking about these ideas that I have and actually begin to implement them. I also want to deploy tools to my environment that assist me in enhancing my life.

So, the rough plan is to revisit once more the infrastructure and runtime. I’ve decided to deploy LXD in a cluster across my two Intel NUCs and an XPS 13 laptop I have laying around. I am on the lookout for a third NUC of the same make and model as the other two, but the Intel changes to the NUC line are making that a bit more difficult. Along with just a more conscious mindset when it comes to money spend, I am a bit slower to spend on things like hardware. I do see myself buying more RAM, there is 16GB per NUC currently and I would like to increase that to 64GB. I will also start to transition away from Docker and Docker Compose, towards LXC and perhaps some kind of orchestrator or PAAS for other things.

Monitoring will also transition to something new, going all in to the Grafana stack of monitoring tooling, something that they call the LGTM stack. I would love to be able to have some observability over my local runtime and applications that I can rely on. Uptime Kuma should stick around, but hopefully with more real world monitors on there instead of my strategy of simply having monitors for things that pointed to localhost.

Storage also needs improvements to attain 3-2-1 data principles on as much of my own spinning rust as I can. I am considering moving away from Synology and towards 45Homelab. I think I could solve some future proofing on the compute front if I spec out systems with plenty of CPU. I am waiting for the 1U and 2U units to be announced, which may be a while. But once they are a thing, I will spec systems out and compare to Synology equivalents on a per system cost basis, then make decisions on what kind of storage devices I want. I think my hard drives are approaching the three to four year mark in terms of age, so there is a chance the bathtub curve will start to rear its head at me.

For networking, I do plan to introduce a 10Gb backbone for devices. I was planning on getting an Aggregation switch from Ubiquiti and having Flex-XGs as leaf switches. But I think the number of ports that would be used for devices and then uplinking back, would make the Flex-XGs need to scale out to more physical devices, at a cost greater than one of their main 10Gb switches. Having an aggregation switch is also not really solving many problems then, besides becoming a single point of failure. Those are hard to get rid of in a home environment. I continue to live and breathe Tailscale, it is solving so many problems for me at this moment in time and I don’t think it’s something I want to change as having things be in flux is what leaves me in these paralysed states of not doing anything.

Finally, for applications and services, I need to really put Grocy back into service and kick the tyres on Paperless. Those are two things that can solve a lot of problems for me potentially. I also wish to get a Home Assistant Green to turn that into an appliance that would hopefully just work. And for software, there’s a few things that I want to write for myself in my self hosting world, but there is also things I want to write for my business. I don’t think I could ever truly go back into self employment, a 9-5 has its own unique perks. But maybe if I get fired, I could give it a go for a while when in between jobs.

So, that’s me for now! Hopefully leaving a state of sadness behind and entering a state of joyful productivity for a hobby that I do well and truly love.