Hey everyone! I'm excited to dive into DevOps, but I could really use your advice on setting up a home lab. I have no prior experience with DevOps tools, but I've been learning Python scripting for about a month through some resources. I'd like to set up my lab on an AWS virtual machine since I don't have my own laptop. I'm considering installing either Oracle Cloud or VMware Workstation there. Is that a feasible approach, or am I off track? I'd appreciate any suggestions or insights from you. Just for some context, I have 6.5 years of experience in IT as a support engineer.
4 Answers
I’d recommend looking into Hetzner. You can grab either inexpensive VPS or dedicated servers to set up VMs. For that, you could use Proxmox or Debian combined with Incus. Once you have your own platform, you can experiment with Kubernetes clusters or Podman containers.
If you're open to building a PC, a rig with a Ryzen 5700 CPU or something similar along with 32GB or even 64GB of RAM would work great. Load free ESXi or Proxmox on it and use a couple of 1-2TB SSDs for your VMs. Alternatively, you could opt for cloud services. Oracle Cloud offers some free VMs, and AWS and GCP might have no-cost offerings as well. Don't forget to check out CSPs like DigitalOcean or Hetzner for cheaper VM options. If you want a career in DevOps, getting acquainted with AWS, Azure, GCP, and Oracle is definitely beneficial.
What exactly are you hoping to achieve? If you're looking for something budget-friendly, you could rent a cheap VPS from Hetzner and run multiple containers using Podman. If you're aiming for full virtual machines, consider getting more VPS instances instead.
Running VMware Workstation on an AWS virtual machine doesn’t really make sense. You might want to explore other options that suit your needs better.
You might be shocked at what you can accomplish with a budget setup! For instance, check out this little gem on Amazon—it’s only $159 and packs 16GB of RAM plus a 500GB SSD. Ideal for learning DevOps!