One RaspBerry to replace my K8s cluster

Website for Dad's beekeeping and it consists of k8 with rust microservices? Is this what resume driven development looks like?

Ah, the traps and pitfalls of self hosting.

> I selected HAProxy because I never used it before

That sounds like good arguments for using technology.

Also, while i get the "lure" of self hosting stuff like password managers, i quickly realized that if i lose those data, i will essentially be locked out of pretty much everything, so i have instead settled on letting those be hosted by someone else, and simply backup the data. If i was to self host it, it would probably not be on a Raspberry Pi, but something that supported the criticality of the system being hosted.

Speaking of backups, OP might want to look into something like Healthchecks.io, which incorporates well into cronjobs, and will alert you if a job fails, or doesn't run at all.

As a whole, and without knowing the amount of traffic going in/out of the beekeeper website, it sounds like the whole thing could've been hosted basically for free on Azure, using nothing but Azure Functions and CosmosDB. You get 1 million Azure Function invocations for free per month, and CosmosDB is pretty much free for those request amounts, though you do need to pay $0.25/GB storage per month. The RPi doesn't run on air alone though, and assuming a 5W power draw, it will consume 3.65 kWh/month, which will be around $0.5 ($0.15/kWh) or €1.2 (€0.35/kWh), so Azure might end up being cheaper, depending on how many GB of beekeeping data is there :) Of course there's also the cost of the hardware to figure in.

Oracle Cloud has a generous free tier, but their somewhat recent policy of shutting down everything that isn't operating at 90% load is rather annoying, and you will find yourself restarting VPS monthly. Other than that, they offer you a 4 core ARM machine with 200GB storage and 32GB RAM for free, which is probably as much as the Raspberry Pi offers.

Nice write up. Mirrors some of my own experiences over the last year. Additional small note. You can run certbot from inside a container [0] if you want to, but as noted might require some additional effort (play books to move certs around and restart services mostly).

Have fun on the self hosted journey :D

[0] https://eff-certbot.readthedocs.io/en/stable/install.html#al...

Thanks for sharing your home lab setup—it's just the beginning of a long journey. I can't wait to see what you do next!