#CurrentStatus Episode 53 is about Home Labs. Co-hosts Phoummala Schmitt, Theresa Miller, Holly Lehman and guest Patrick Hubbard discuss whether on-prem or cloud is best for your home lab. Beyond that we will also dive into why you would even consider having a home lab, the use cases, how to monitor costs and even data protection. This home lab episode is not one to miss and you will gain insights into how to decide on it should be a home lab in the cloud or on-prem.
Why have a Home Lab?
We get started by diving into with the big question “What do you hope to do with your lab?” If you have an on-prem lab, do you with go with cloud? Is having a home lab part of your skills/career development? We talked about some of the people that Looking at social recently we also saw that there is a lot of feedback about people running their home labs on-prem.
Cloud or On-Prem?
Whether or not to deploy your lab in the cloud the group today discusses many things. For example, are you doing virtualization, or Kubernetes or what is the use case? This can help you determine if being on-prem or in the cloud would be better. Or maybe you want to go through what it takes to deploy a full vSphere environment.
What about the benefits of spinning up and spinning down servers in the cloud. You don’t pay for compute when the system isn’t online. On-prem electric bill can also be a factor. The decision to deploy in the cloud or on-prem could also be a time thing. Maybe use cloud when don’t have time. We also discuss the GPU use case, and the desire to spend vs trialing in the cloud instead of taking on the overhead at home on-prem. We also discussed that cloud gives you burstability without the operational costs tied to what you are trying to accomplish.
Backing up your Lab Environment
Yes, the group here decided that being able to backup your lab environment creates high value. You spent your personal time doing this and should be a priority. The cloud doesn’t automatically backup, so make sure backups exist – you need to create the backup jobs. Have Azure backup resources in place, make sure the work you put into your setup is protected.
Whatever the reason you have your home lab. Try something for work, your own personal knowledge. Don’t use just one option on backup. Use more and protect your assets as a result of your time.
#CurrentStatus Episode and Recording
Investing in Your Skill Building and Knowledge
Skill building as an investment in your knowledge is one of the primary reasons. You also own the environment and can use the knowledge to drive decision making that your business needs to be successful. When it’s your own home lab you are protecting your investment and considering that environment production and not just test. The value of a home lab can allow you to make sure the decisions and recommendations you make at work also create value to your enterprise. Gaining a sense of ownership that carries through to your professional life.
Audit your Use in the Cloud
Cloud doesn’t come without expense, so it’s important to make sure you are being careful with your resources. Take advantage of reporting or you could end up with a domain being shutdown or paying high fees. All clouds have tools that will help with this. Learn from our mistakes, listen in to hear more.
Concluding Thoughts
Having a home lab has many benefits from expanding your knowledge for personal and work benefits, and much more. Considering cloud before investing money into equipment that becomes obsolete over time can have its benefit. Building you home lab in the cloud or on-prem shouldn’t come without much thought and consideration. Regardless of the decision you make on how to deploy your home lab you cannot go wrong with the learning and skill development that comes with it.
In case you missed it, we also recently covered home network decisions which can be found here.