So here I am, a month longer into the process of updating my HomeLab, changing what I am going to do with the Proxmox server. I have been able to add an additional 1TB SSD to the Proxmox server chassis and am now focusing in on what kinds of programs that I will be doing. I have discovered that ZFS does indeed take a lot of memory, something that I don’t have a lot of. I have also discovered that decent backups alleviate the need to have redundant drives that don’t contain critical information. I have enough backups of critical information on different media that in my estimation preclude the need for redundancy like Raid1. My critical information now resides on laptops that I backup on a regular basis and have nothing to do with the HomeLab structure in the rack. The new 1TB SSD will become an LVM-thin component to complement the LVM-thin on the original 1TB SSD that the system resides on. I can watch the statistics on the drives to know if they are ready to be replaced or not. The UPS will take the shock of brownouts, spikes, and blackouts that will arrive this summer. I have also discovered that I will not be able to force the on-board GPU to a specific VM on the Proxmox server, so that is now off the table.
What this means is that I will be extending the current Proxmox configuration and will probably not be updating the version to 7.2.
I have decided to center on one program that I can focus my attention on and that allows me to achieve many of the goals that I have for my HomeLab. That program will be an implementation of a Weather data gatherer focused on Docker and Node-Red. I have already determined that I can spin up a Node-Red instance in Docker and duplicate it multiple times on the same host. That will be the starting point for both implementing the Weather Data Gatherer and playing around with DevOps.
I recently came across some information on Microservices which seems to fit in nicely with the idea of DevOps in that you break an application down into several different parts, all communicating with each other. It allows for spinning up new versions of the Microservice without having to stop the rest of the microservices, as well as allowing the full CI/CD chain to be implemented in development. This should give me a software means of learning new development techniques.
