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scottyahtoday at 3:58 AM2 repliesview on HN

Sure!

Get a few Beelink SER5 or SER9's, install Nextcloud to cover the files, document editing, communications (to save on Microsoft 365). Then you can have Gitea (and gitea actions) for your source code and building (skipping github enterprise), Harbor to host and scan your containers, frappe for HR, etc. Pretty much anything you pay enterprise rates for, you can self-host a version that will get your company from 1 to 100s with minimal extra work. If it's not on https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted, you can probably vibe code it in a couple hours.

I just started to run a k3s cluster with an almost enterprise grade software factory and a few (light) production workloads on a single cheap minipc.

https://scottyah.com/cluster


Replies

xyzzy123today at 10:30 AM

The concept totally works but I would worry about using a beelink in a business context where I had to support it.

For up to low hundreds of users I think you're better off just with 1 vertically scalable box for all the officey / web server workloads.

You mitigate the hardware failure stuff with a vendor contract where you can get someone on-site and overnight you parts, and by keeping things super boring. Volume replication is not boring, avoid at all costs. NAS or SAN if you have to but all disks in the main box for as long as you can.

For 20 person SME maybe a 2-bay Synology or similar, for a heavier company a low end 2U with hardware support. Proxmox under the OS for reduced worry snapshots, rollback, backup etc. Proxmox is there for operational flexibility, resist the temptation to create a network of VMs, you just need 1 CT or VM with all the workload inside it.

For container workloads on 1 host Portainer works as well as k8s IMHO, it gives you the key property you want - you can IaC everything declaratively with terraform + compose over an API.

Caveat that if CI gets heavy you might need to scale that out but you can keep it stateless.

gear54rustoday at 10:16 AM

I checked your page. Wanted to ask, are you using longhorn with k3s for replicated volumes? How beefy a box do you need for that (CPU/MEM/Disk speed)?

I have several VMs in clouds with similar k3s architecture as yours and am wondering if there are any benefits to installing longhorn vs sticking to logical (postgres, mimir, whateveritis) replication instead.