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Engineer Builds 4-Node Kubernetes Cluster on $220 of Scrap Hardware to Close Skills Gap

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A cloud infrastructure professional built a bare-metal Kubernetes cluster at home using a salvaged Dell OptiPlex and three Raspberry Pi 4s, spending roughly $220 in total. The setup runs Talos Linux, Cilium eBPF networking, ArgoCD for GitOps delivery, Longhorn for distributed storage, and Prometheus with Grafana for monitoring. The engineer, who works with AWS professionally, undertook the project because managed cloud environments offer little room to experiment with failures or deeply understand underlying systems. The build involved significant trial and error, including burned SD cards, a self-inflicted cluster outage from a bad Cilium network policy, and etcd disk exhaustion caused by unquoted Longhorn volume replicas. The project reflects a personal rule of not claiming expertise in a technology without having operated it outside a managed control plane.

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Engineer Builds 4-Node Kubernetes Cluster on $220 of Scrap Hardware to Close Skills Gap · ShortSingh