Being a noob and all I was wondering whats the real benefit of having a monolithic lets say proxmox instance with router, DNS, VPN but also home asssistant and NAS functionalitiy all in one server? I always thought dedicated devices are simpler to maintain or replace and some services are also more critical than others I guess?
Use containers. Start with one device. Check your utilization after you’re sure you’ve hit min and max for each of your services, then figure out if your single device can handle all your services gunning at once. If not, take your biggest service and migrate it to its own device.
Eventually, you might find yourself googling “Kubernetes vs Docker Swarm.” When you do that, take a deep breath and decide if upgrading one device is easier than trying to horizontally scale many.
Edit: Words bad. Verbs hard.
Yeah, definitely go with a single machine for containers if you haven’t seen a need for disaggregation. Even a cheap Aliexpress N100 box is super capable.
Regarding the jump to Kubernetes, I will point out that Kubernetes is a tool for container orchestration and automation, not necessarily a container cluster. I have found many benefits from using Kubernetes on a single node, so I wouldn’t consider container clustering a prerequisite for Kubernetes.