Home Lab Part 1: Why build one?

Apr 6, 2020 hobbies homelabbing

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So, as I mentioned in the first post of the blog, the homelab topic is going to be frequent in this blog. And I would like to start sharing my experience of why I decided to start a home lab.

There are many ways to gain or maintain knowledge, and it may be theoretical or practical, in the best-case scenario both. I spent many years installing and supporting network security solutions and when I started to work as a Systems Engineer at Fortinet, everything changed, especially the ways I have to develop expertise in topics outside the realm of the product portfolio.

If you are a hardcore geek like me, work for a network security vendor is heaven. You can have access to a lot of technical resources and software/hardware that gives you tons of knowledge. But "with great power comes a great responsibility," and the main one is to use that knowledge to help customers and systems integrators to secure network environments with enterprise-grade solutions.

It is entirely optional to have a home lab; without one, you can still do an excellent job in whatever area you work in. And I think it has a lot to do with what and how do you want to learn. In my case, I do prefer self-learning, but not always a computer and the internet are enough. It requires lots and lots of hours reading and trying/testing a lot, and where to try stuff? That's the dilemma.

In the age of virtualization and cloud, there are many ways to use or deploy resources to use for testing and learning. It also depends on what do you want or need to learn; it could be networking, systems administration, programming, cloud, DevOps, and a long etcetera.

And it also depends and how much you are willing to invest (everything related to learning is always an investment, not an expense). Also, I hear that "Everybody needs a hobby." well, mine is to keep learning and found in a home lab the perfect way to do it.

In my next post, I'm going to share some resources that I used before I started my home lab project; and others that I can recommend based on different topics.

Thanks for reading

The next post of this sries can be found here: