To home lab or not to home lab

As I often do, I am again debating my need for a home lab.  My job is highly technical, to take technology architecture and tie it all together with the strategic goals of my customers.  Keeping my technical skills up to date is a full time job in and of itself, and begs the question, should I build out a home lab, or are my cloud based labs sufficient.

One of the perks to working at a large company is the ability to use our internal lab systems.  This can also include my laptop with VMware Workstation or Fusion product which affords some limited testing capabilities, mostly due to memory constraints.  Most of the places I have been have had great internal labs, demo gear, etc, which has been nice.  I have often maintained my own equipment as well, but to what end.  Keeping the equipment up to date becomes a full time job, and adds little value to my daily job.

With the competition in cloud providers, many providers will provide low or no cost environments for testing.  While this is not always ideal, for the most part, we are now able to run nested virtual systems, testing various hypervisors, and other solutions.  Many companies are now providing virtual appliance based products which enable us to stay fairly up to date.

Of course one of my favorites is VMware’s Hands on Labs.  In fairness I am a bit biased, working at VMware, and with the hands on labs team as often as I can.  Since a large majority of what I do centers around VMware’s technology, I will often run through the labs myself to stay sharp on the technology.

While the home lab will always have a special place in my heart, and while I am growing a rather large collection of raspberry pi devices, I think my home lab will be limited to smaller lower power devices for IoT testing for the moment.  While always subject to change, it is tough to justify the capital expenditure when there are so many good alternatives.

To home lab or not to home lab

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