I’ve been loooking at mini PC’s. At home, I have a large, and quite power hungry server that I use for running all my virtual machines.
Whilst useful – it does take a considerable amount of power – about 250W all the time. With the cost of electricity these days it’s a not inconsiderable sum. 6kWh is what it uses a day, which is £1.50 a day, £10 or so a week, so £520 a year.
I needed to find something better, and this little Mini PC from MSI caught my eye. It also made me realise that this is the perfect device to recommend to people to set up their own home lab for dabbling with AWS and related Devops things…
Now if you have been following my ramblings, you will know that I am a great proponent of learning by doing – and there is no better way of learning this than getting your hands stuck in and well, doing stuff. The only trouble is that it can be a bit expensive…
Amazon do a fantastic job of the free web tier meaning that you can get your hands on some excellent things totally free of charge and actually use it for real production workloads. This is good – and if you dont have your free tier account set up you really should go and do it right now. The only problem is that it is a bit limited…
You see, what you really need to learn properly is something like GitLab – and that needs memory. AWS are quite understandably not going to hand out machines with 4 to 8GB of RAM for free, and that is what you need to really test Gitlab etc… so you have the problem that you can either suck up the cost – which isn’t much, or struggle with the free tier and have a lot fo frustrating out of memory issues to solve.
Theres also the problem of using up the free tier as well – if you fire up an EC2 instance, and it crashes, then you have just used an hours worth of run time. Remember that EC2 instances are charged by the hour and the free tier is 720 hours a month. If you crash your EC2 instance ten times and have to restart it – each time that’s ten hours of running gone, even if the instance was only up for a few minutes.
So you either pay for an EC2 instance – or pay for the electricty to run at home – as well as the capital cost for the server which could be considerable…
Enter the N100 from Intel.
This is the processor that uses a mere fraction of the power of anything else, and is still performant enough to get a lot of work done. My little cube computer sips about 11W of power – at full load! The running cost of that is nothing, it’s no more than a couple of energy saving lightbulbs. About 6p a day, about £30 or so a year I think it worked out at. The complete computer cost me no more than £300 with memory and storage, and I will get that back in less than a year just from the power savings from not running the old server…
To learn Devops – you cannot beat learning by doing. So, I suggest that you get a small computer, get proxmox installed on it, and then install the infrastructure that you need to do this. Get Gitlab installed, and get a Linux instance installed with the AWS CLI on it. Start poking at AWS with Terraform that your CICD pipe runs. This is how you learn..
I’ve shot a couple of videos showing the inside of the MSI Cubi, and how I configure the disks on it to support Proxmox. The rest is up to you to learn and puzzle about – but this is an excellent starting platform to learn how you can use and lever AWS to enhance your career. I will build upon this and show how you can extend your journey into AWS in future posts. I would have to say though – please excuse the quality of the video and the sound – I know they are not exactly ideal and any info or tips on improving them are warmly welcomed!
Proxmox – free home virtualisation based on debian.. https://proxmox.com/en/