CubitOom

You are right. But proxmox and many of the other suggestions aren’t vms either.

If you are dipping toes into containers with kvm and proxmox already, then perhaps you could jump into the deep end and look at kubernetes (k8s).

Even though you say you don’t need production quality. It actually does a lot for you and you just need to learn a single API framework which has really great documentation.

Personally, if I am choosing a new service to host. One of my first metrics in that decision is how well is it documented.

You could also go the simple route and use docker to make containers. However making your own containers is optional as most services have pre built ones that you can use.

You could even use auto scaling to run your cluster with just 1 node if you don’t need it to be highly available with a lot of 9s in uptime.

The trickiest thing with K8s is the networking, certs and DNS but there are services you can host to take care of that for you. I use istio for networking, cert-manager for certs and external-dns for DNS.

I would recommend trying out k8s first on a cloud provider like digital ocean or linode. Managing your own k8s control plane on bare metal has its own complications.

I would say that if you are going to host it at home then kubenetes is more complex. Bare metal kubernetes control plane management has some pitfalls. But if you were to use a cloud provider like linode or digital ocean and use their kubernetes service, then only real extra complexity is learning how to manage Kubernetes which is minimal.

There is a decent hardware investment needed to run kubernetes if you want it to be fully HA (which I would argue means it needs to be a minimum of 2 clusters of 3 nodes each on different continents) but you could run a single node cluster with autoscaling at a cloud provider if you don’t need HA. I will say it’s nice not to have to worry about a service failing periodically as it will just transfer to another node in a few seconds automatically.

With a basic understanding of how k8s works and an already running cluster, all one needs to know is how to run a service as a docker file to have it also run in k8s

Well the kubernetes API has all the necessary parts built in mostly, although sometimes you may want to install a custom resource which often comes with complex service installs.

But I think the biggest strength of kubernetes is all the foss projects that are available for it. Specifically external-dns, cert-manager, and istio. These are separate projects and will have to be installed after the cluster is up.

You can also look at the cloud native computing foundation’s list of projects. It’s a good list of things that work well.

Caution, not all cloud providers support istio. I know that Google’s GKS doesn’t, they make you use their own fork of it

I would also recommend you avoid helm if possible as it obfuscates what the cluster is doing and might make learning harder. Try to just stick to using kubectl if possible.

I have heard good things about nomad too but I have yet to try it.

You should try out all the options you listed and the other recommendations and find what works best for you.

I personally use Kubernetes. It can be overwhelming but if you’re willing to learn some new jargon then try a managed kubernetes cluster. Like AKS or digital ocean kubernetes. I would avoid managing a kubernetes cluster yourself.

Kubernetes gets a lot of flack for being overly complicated but what is being overlooked with that statement is all the things that kubernetes does for you.

If you can spin up kubernetes with cert-manager, external-dns, and an ingress controller like istio then you got a whole automated data center for your docker containers.

Checkout ollama.

There’s a lot of models you can pull from the official library.

Using ollama, you can also run external gguf models found on places like huggingface if you use a modelfile with something as simple as

echo "FROM ~/Documents/ollama/models/$model_filepath" >| ~/Documents/ollama/modelfiles/$model_name.modelfile

Pass for personal use is great. Especially if paired with a self hosted private git repo like gitea.

Pass works well on all platforms I’ve tried, even android and wsl (although I’ve not tried with iPhone).

In a corporate setting. The biggest questions is going to be if there is already a secret store that has an API. If security will let you roll your own. How is it allowed to be networked. Who are the preferred vendors and is there any enterprise support available.

Wait till you guys use cert-manager on a kubernetes cluster

I haven’t used vim in a while, so not sure. But you can use vim key bindings in emacs with evil-mode.

Org-mode can also be exported into markdown.

Markdown is cool since it’s used in a lot of places. But org-mode has so many more features and can be a drop in replacement in most cases.

If you like obsidian but want a FOSS alternative, you might want to try out emacs org-mode and org-roam.

Here is an example video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyhPmypHDEw