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7/25/2026
I Run Bare-Metal Kubernetes on $200 of Scrap Hardware (And Why I Burned 3 SD Cards Learning)

I Run Bare-Metal Kubernetes on $200 of Scrap Hardware (And Why I Burned 3 SD Cards Learning)

Short summary

An AWS infrastructure engineer built a 4-node bare-metal Kubernetes cluster from scrap hardware (~$220) running Talos Linux, Cilium, ArgoCD, and Longhorn to learn what managed services hide. The article documents every failure — bricked Pis, burned SD cards, Cilium network policy lockouts, etcd disk exhaustion — and argues that operating infrastructure without a managed control plane reveals gaps that certifications don't cover.

  • •4-node K8s cluster built from a free Dell OptiPlex and three Raspberry Pi 4s for ~$220
  • •Running Talos Linux, Cilium eBPF, ArgoCD GitOps, Longhorn storage, and MetalLB BGP load balancing
  • •Key lessons: Cilium kube-proxy replacement silently breaks firewall rules, etcd disk exhaustion from Longhorn replicas, SD cards fail fast under K8s workloads

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