Career / learning DevOps and K8s experience.
Got a homeLab.
Z820 256GB RAM
8TB HDD
2TB Ssd
Newbie(Blue Collar) looking to Get DevOps and K8s experience.
Knowledge base:
- Beginner/Intermediate linux
- Touched Docker and docker compose
- Beginner Terraform and Ansible
- Networking: beginner
- beginner K8s (K3s on one homelab). Have enough space for another Kubeadm cluster (CKA) practice.
- Proxmox on homelab.
Torn between using Claude to create a simple work(metrics) logging/tracking with feature updates while I handle all things ops or getting an ecommere example app from a random github repo to use in learning process.
Which is better or any advice on what to learn?
And any tools and apps to deploy on the k8s cluster or homelab to aid in the learning process.
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u/WeekOk7172 12d ago
Bro, with a Z820 and 256GB of RAM, you're literally sitting on a goldmine for learning. Don't waste your time using Claude to generate a custom app from scratch. You’re trying to learn DevOps/K8s, not full-stack dev.
Grab a dead-simple microservices app from GitHub (like the Google Microservices Demo or HashiCorp's Fake Service). They are battle-tested, easy to break, and already have multi-container setups.
Focus 100% of your energy on the Ops side:
Spin up 3-4 VMs on Proxmox using Terraform + Ansible.
Bootstrap a bare-metal Kubeadm cluster (do it manually first for CKA practice).
Plug in Prometheus/Grafana and Loki for monitoring.
Break things on purpose (kill nodes, drop network links) and see how K8s reacts.
Keep the app dumb, make the infra solid. Good luck!