If you’re running containers for things that don’t require a lot of resources, you can do a lot with a used NUC or micro form factor PC with i5 or Ryzen 5 from the 2020s, 8 GB RAM, and a 256GB SSD. You can get business desktops on eBay and elsewhere for pretty cheap and the i5/8GB/256GB or R5/8GB/256GB configuration is everywhere. If you want, you can even pick a machine that has a single 8GB stick and add a second, or you can replace the storage with a larger drive. But either way, cruise used listings for off-lease or recently upgraded business gear and then grab 3rd party RAM/storage to upgrade as needed from there. I grab Ryzen when I need stuff and it’s available because it usually saves a few bucks and works great. More and more businesses are buying systems with 16GB RAM as a baseline so you might find one of those machines for cheap and you just doubled your memory.
I’ve got 3 NUCs just like this set up along with a dedicated NAS to act as a storage repo.
If, instead of containers, you are running full-on virtual machines, that changes things because the VMs will allocate whatever resources you allow them to have access to like a greedy asshole roommate. I really like using containers for the stuff I keep in Proxmox though.
If you’re running containers for things that don’t require a lot of resources, you can do a lot with a used NUC or micro form factor PC with i5 or Ryzen 5 from the 2020s, 8 GB RAM, and a 256GB SSD. You can get business desktops on eBay and elsewhere for pretty cheap and the i5/8GB/256GB or R5/8GB/256GB configuration is everywhere. If you want, you can even pick a machine that has a single 8GB stick and add a second, or you can replace the storage with a larger drive. But either way, cruise used listings for off-lease or recently upgraded business gear and then grab 3rd party RAM/storage to upgrade as needed from there. I grab Ryzen when I need stuff and it’s available because it usually saves a few bucks and works great. More and more businesses are buying systems with 16GB RAM as a baseline so you might find one of those machines for cheap and you just doubled your memory.
I’ve got 3 NUCs just like this set up along with a dedicated NAS to act as a storage repo.
If, instead of containers, you are running full-on virtual machines, that changes things because the VMs will allocate whatever resources you allow them to have access to like a greedy asshole roommate. I really like using containers for the stuff I keep in Proxmox though.