Both at NOAA and at Sophos, we run much larger and more expensive virtual environments (“Clouds”) than what most people can afford for home use. In order to experiment and learn on sandboxes prior to the DEV/QA/PROD environments of my office, I was running AWS Lightsail and Google Compute Platform. Unfortunately, I quickly learned that AWS Lightsail was running me $53/week for my usage; far too expensive for hosted virtualization.
So I built a new VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0.0 Hypervisor for home use and began virtualizing all of the Infrastructure-as-Code efforts I’ve been using for my job. There really isn’t much need for running physical servers particularly when so much of our code is Docker Containers and Microservices. While I still use VMware Fusion on each of my Macs and VMware Workstation Pro on each of my Windows machines, I’m building virtual servers using Terraform, Ansible, Docker, and doing deployments using Jenkins. The virtual servers themselves are cloneable and portable, allowing me to run them on my ESXi server or on my laptops.
With these efforts, I’ll be documenting far more to the Tayledras Wiki starting with Infrastructure as Code at Home. It’s been a rapid brain dump so far as I build out virtual servers at home mirroring my AWS efforts elsewhere, but as I work on components, develop better configurations/scripts/playbooks, I expect my documentation will improve dramatically.
So if you’re interested, feel free to watch or read my articles on Tayledras Wiki. I suspect it’ll improve quite rapidly over the coming weeks and months.