As a DevOps engineer, I’ve always found it crucial to have a home lab to experiment, learn, and keep up with new technologies. Recently, I decided to set up my own homelab to run Kubernetes clusters. I had two primary requirements: keeping power consumption low and building redundancy with at least 3 nodes. My budget was around $1000-1300, and I considered both ARM64 and AMD64 processor-based systems.
In this post, I’ll walk you through the hardware options I explored, compare the two architectures, and explain why you might choose one over the other depending on your use case.
