I really have to disagree, if you're going the route of hosting stuff in your home, then by all means take an easy k8s distro like rancher. I have stuff running from openhab, Nextcloud to even my Unifi controller. It runs flawlessly; and together with Rook, I don't have to be afraid of node and disk failures. I haven't learned so much in 2 years since I started linux 20y ago.

Personally I think the amount of pain wasn't enough, so I'm using Canonical Maas, and I can just spin up extra servers, though going beyond 4 nodes seems kind of wasteful in a home setting. Though my rig seeps 100Watt, which for hobby purposes is okayish imo. I've been running this since Ubuntu 16.04 and upgrading to 18.04 has been a relative breeze compared to a situation where I would've built this using adhoc scripts(i.e. non-k8s setup.)

I did make a wireguard tunnel to a colocation datacenter for offsite backups using async mirroring of rook/ceph. B/c with so many moving parts and automation, wiping a cluster accidentally is quite possible.

Haha. I'm a little bit lacking in my "k8s ops" skills and hope to learn by practicing! Currently there isn't any serious "production" workload running on the k8s cluster. Perhaps if I become more comfortable with managing the k8s cluster, I will migrate my other services onto k8s. We'll see!

I had the same thought. I myself used LXD for my personal server and I can't regret enough.

Not that I dislike LXD, but a good configured server won't require many interventions. In my case, I was about to upgrade some guest SO, and I had to relearn lots of things and remember what I did, even why, after about two years without touching it.

After a couple of times in my life with similar pains, I’m now very disciplined with having everything sans data and secrets in git repos with Ansible playbooks and Terraform templates.

Even if it’s just for me I still try to write reasonable commit messages and all that.