I Run Bare-Metal Kubernetes on $200 of Scrap Hardware (And Why I Burned 3 SD Cards Learning)
From a bricked Raspberry Pi to a 4-node Talos Linux cluster running Cilium eBPF, ArgoCD, and Longhorn — every failure, every fix, and the homelab that now hosts my production side projects.
The Setup
It started with a Dell OptiPlex I found in a recycling pile.
Intel i5-6500, 16GB DDR4, a 256GB SATA SSD. Someone's discarded office PC. I wiped the Windows 10 sticker off the case, installed Proxmox, and told myself: "This is going to be my cloud."
