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

Om Podcasten

Heavy Networking is an unabashedly nerdy dive into all things networking. Described by one listener as "verbal white papers," the weekly episodes feature network engineers, industry experts, and vendors sharing useful information to keep your professional knowledge sharp and your career growing. Hosts Greg Ferro, Ethan Banks and Drew Conry-Murray cut through the marketing spin to explore what works—and what doesn't—in networking today, while keeping an eye on what's ahead for the industry. On air since 2010, Heavy Networking is the flagship show of the Packet Pushers podcast network.