What is a homelab?

A homelab is infrastructure you run at home—servers, VMs, networking gear, and services—used for learning, self-hosting, and experimentation. It’s your own small “cloud” under your control.

Why run one?

  • Learning — Get hands-on with virtualization, containers, networking, and security without touching production.
  • Self-hosting — Host file sync, media, backups, dashboards, or dev tools instead of relying only on SaaS.
  • Career — Real experience with Proxmox, Docker, VLANs, and automation is valuable for DevOps, SRE, or infrastructure roles.
  • Fun — Building and maintaining systems can be satisfying; homelabs are a great sandbox.

You don’t need much to start

A single old PC or NUC with a hypervisor (e.g. Proxmox) or Docker is enough. Add networking and storage as you grow.

In Part 2 we’ll look at common building blocks: hypervisors, containers, networking, and storage.