Heavy Networking 662: Home Lab In The Cloud Or Your Basement?

Where should you house your home networking lab? The answer used to be…home (duh). Probably in the basement in a cheap rack or in a stack on a folding table. You had real hardware you scrounged from wherever, and you paid the electric bill. That morphed into GNS3 and later EVE-NG or CML, or more modern variants like ContainerLab. But you still ran that virtualized lab at home…on your laptop for smaller labs, or on an eBay server with a lot of cores and RAM for bigger labs. My home lab is pretty much this model. I have a rack in the basement with an old server running ESXi. 16 cores and 128GB of RAM. Plus I have a mish-mash of old network hardware–routers and switches just in case I need to do hardware dependent stuff. So why not cloud? The answer for me has been a mix of “I’m scared it will cost me more than I planned on spending” and “hardware in a rack makes me happy”. Oh…and general laziness. If I have a solution that works, finding a motivation lever long enough to disrupt my inertia is hard. Our guest today is Tom Costello. Tom hosts his home lab in a cloud. And we’re going to talk about it, because he’s gone in deep on cloud-hosted networking labs with lots of automation to make it all go. We discuss: * Why you might want a home lab in the first place * Why EVE-NG and not CML * Why Tom chose Google’s cloud for his personal lab * Getting comfortable with scripting and automation tools * Automating spin-up and tear-down to control costs * Options and resources for people new to cloud-based labs * More Sponsor: InterOptic Fortune 500 companies choose InterOptic optical transceivers to minimize the risk of network failures and maximize IT savings. InterOptic’s transceivers are 100% guaranteed compatible with Cisco, Juniper, Extreme, Arista and others, and available at a fraction of the cost. Work with the optics experts at InterOptic! Go to interoptic.com/packet-pushers/ to find out more. Show Links: @kd9cpb – Tom Costello on Twitter kd9cpb.com – Tom’s blog Automating startup/shutdown of a GCP eve-ng homelab with VPN tunnel – kdpcpb