I Run Bare-Metal Kubernetes on $200 of Scrap Hardware (And Why I Burned 3 SD Cards Learning)
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community 5
strategic 3
personal 7
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Bare-metal Kubernetes on scrap hardware aligns with platform engineering and cost optimization interests.
Summary
A senior engineer built a 4-node bare-metal Kubernetes cluster for ~$220 using a recycled Dell OptiPlex and three Raspberry Pi 4s, running Talos Linux, Cilium eBPF, ArgoCD, and Longhorn. The project intentionally breaks managed Kubernetes patterns to learn failure modes like etcd disk exhaustion from unbounded Longhorn replicas and Cilium's eBPF kube-proxy silently breaking firewall rules. After burning three SD cards, the author switched to USB-SSD boot on the Pis and now runs production side projects on the homelab.