I am trying to plan my home lab to satisfy two different needs:
- I want a stable environment where I will put a relatively expensive NAS and maybe some other Zima boards.
- I also want to try new versions and configurations in an env where I can break stuff BEFORE trying things on my Production environment. I would also like to use that environment to try other things like playing with Kubernetes, Docker, Iceberg, etc. I am a backend software engineer so this is very useful to me. Besides being fun.
So, I am just trying to gather ideas on how to configure this both in terms of software and hardware.
Why would you only need a NAS in one environment? If everything is otherwise the same, and the function of the NAS is just hosting a similar service integration with less actual binary object data, then you make that same integration point available point in both environments to be able to test that portion.
If this is just homelab stuff, you don’t need two environments like this, you just need a way to switch contexts and rollback between two places. This is not what staging environments are for.
No. I really need Production to be stable because other people will be using it. And I do not want my own playing around to cause issues.
I am really considering both @slazer2au@lemmy.world idea of a smaller NAS from the same company and @Zachariah@lemmy.world idea of just creating a new volume in the same NAS.
If you’re very concerned just have your prod environment and kick up test services in docker containers and test your tweaks and changes there.
Doing this ad-hoc will be easier and more practical than trying to maintain two full environments like you’re a series B startup finding it’s feet!
That will have a host of other issues that is not super fluid to work with while trying to maintain similar environments. Most notably the networking.
If this causes networking issues, your setup is already too complicated to manage through a flat set of docker containers. That’s not a bad thing, this just isn’t the horse for that course so to speak.
Not causing network issues, but for a layman that isn’t familiar with managing multiple environments already, controlling a multi-env containerized environment is going to be a nightmare if solely just using containers as a staging environment. It doesn’t map to what his prod env (non-container) would be, and it’s not going to catch problems which would arise from his prod environment anyway if looking at from an integration standpoint.