If you browse r/homelab you’ll undoubtedly find flexing showcases of server racks with RGB lighting, Unifi switching, refurbished servers, and dangling Pis. This is what you picture when you hear “homelab.” Somebody who has bought used enterprise - or not so enterprise - hardware to use at home, because they love their job so much they’d do it for free. Or maybe it’s a data hoarder - someone who has a retirement account’s worth of hard drives they purchased before the prices of even spinning hard drives shot through the roof thanks to the acceleration of datacenter construction in 2025.
But walk into any modernized enterprise IDF and you’ll see something vastly different. Switches have replaced console ports with QR codes for quick enrollment in cloud management services. Tape libraries and dedicated rack-scale storage appliances are fewer and far between. There are just fewer servers now. The ones that are left have been given a new name. We call it edge computing now to avoid admitting to ourselves that not everything can live in centralized, hyperscale datacenters.
In an age where so much of the tools one used to run in an enterprise homelab - Active Directory, SCCM, VMware, SQL, etc. - no longer have a line item in your day job’s budget, how can your homelab adapt to continue to be a sandbox for your wildest dreams, and a workbench used to prepare for professional certifications? What will you even build on when the market for used server hardware dries up as companies are increasingly turning to running their workloads in the cloud?
What happened, exactly?
Nearly every role in IT has been completely turned inside out due to the industry’s shift towards SaaS, IaaS, and cloud computing in general. Tier 1 technicians are now troubleshooting identity and integration issues instead of operating system and peripheral issues. Network engineers work in cloud portals instead of consoles. Identity directories, configuration management tools, service management platforms, and more have all been replaced with SaaS services like Okta, Intune, and ServiceNow which can get you a production-ready instance within seconds of completing your credit card transaction. These are the new tools you’re using on a daily basis at work. You may run services like Plex in your homelab simply for personal enjoyment, but what about the projects you used to do to further your career professionally? If actual, nationally recognized companies are considering retiring their Active Directory in the next decade and newly formed ventures wouldn’t even consider deploying one, what’s the modern day equivalent of setting up multi-forest directory trust between 6 frankensteined desktop PCs?
The answer that many don’t even consider is also obvious if you’d read to here (and/or read the URL slug). With a few annoying exceptions (ahem, Apple), there’s really nothing stopping you from deploying the same cloud services you use at work at “home.” Okta, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Atlassian, and Duo, just to name a few, all have free plans and/or per-user pricing designed to scale to companies of thousands of employees and thus, typically charge as little as $1/month for 1 seat of their service. Couple that with the fact that “traditional” homelabbing always had some level of capital investment in hardware and sometimes software, you can typically justify even a Microsoft 365 Business Premium license for yourself. So reframe the subscription as your hardware budget, and the math holds up. There’s a lot you can do with just an identity and collaboration platform from Microsoft or Google. Couple that with the generous free tiers of serverless compute products on Cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure, AWS, GCP, and Cloudflare, and even the community editions of Qualys or Tenable, and you can easily have a lifetime of self-inflicted midnight outages to deal with.
New foundations for new times
The first projects that turned my network closet from “Synology NAS’s bedroom” to “Homelab” were deploying a VMware cluster, Active Directory on that for authentication to the VMware deployment, Zabbix to monitor those, and Tailscale to access it all. Compute and Identity were and still are to this day really core elements Makerland. Unfortunately, access to Compute also tends to be the largest barrier new homelabbers face. To that I ask, why get started in the past? Instead of investing in hardware to learn technologies your boss is actively trying to retire, you can invest in cloud services that mirror what you’ll be using professionally, often at a fraction of the cost and with far less hassle.
The aforementioned Microsoft 365 Business Premium costs, at the time of writing, $26.40 per month. That is less than some people pay for Netflix and far less than the average American’s monthly phone bill bill. For just one license you get:
- Copilot Chat (of course Microsoft is listing that at the top of their product comparison right now 😂)
- Microsoft 365 Desktop apps
- A full Microsoft Exchange tenant with 50GB of storage for your inbox, capable of sending and receiving mail at a custom domain
- A full Entra ID P1 tenant with conditional access, all the MFA options, the ability to Entra Join a Windows PC or Mac
- A full Intune tenant - seriously, every standard feature of Intune, all of the ones you’re probably using at work, are included
- A full Sharepoint tenant
- Microsoft Defender for Endpoint - You can enroll all your devices and get experience with real threat hunting and endpoint incident response
- Access to DLP tools and settings to train with
- Access to Windows 11 Business, Azure Virtual Desktop, cloud printing
- 1TB of OneDrive storage
- So. Much. More.
You could easily spend a year’s worth of free time just building out your Intune deployment so you can reimage your desktop every time that video game fails to load because you installed a sketchy driver last week. You could dive deep into vulnerability management, threat hunting, isolating endpoints, and configuring EDR policies in Defender. I’d argue it’s worth it purely for the 1TB of OneDrive storage and custom email domain that doesn’t feed Google’s advertising algorithms.
Once you have an Entra tenant, an Azure subscription is only a few clicks away too. Azure has a bunch of always free services, and you also get a year of free allowances to full Virtual Machines. You can get started, with real technologies your next employer wants to see, without talking to a single person selling questionably obtained SFF desktops on Craigslist.
Why does nobody talk about this?
So, why don’t you see anyone talking about their cloud homelab? I think it’s two things, and both are invalid.
There’s nothing to “show off”
This is probably the most obvious one. People associate serious homelabbing with a particular dedication to one’s career that requires tedious research on Ebay and dedicating physical space in your home. It’s something you can take pictures of, decorate with RGB lighting, and it sparks questions whenever you have guests. It’s a physical symbol of the resistance against the consumer technology industry’s obsession with cloud-locked, subscription-funded, own-nothing services. Cable management is undeniable proof of your skills in your craft.
Let’s push back on that. There’s plenty you can do to polish the aesthetic of any SaaS deployment. Take the time to implement SSO on everything. Even services that don’t support SAML natively. Go passwordless and spend weeks chasing every edge case of Remote Credential Guard regression. Implement conditional access and brag that you’re more HIPAA compliant than your workplace will ever be in the next ten years.
Cloud is the lazy route
This is the biggest misconception of our generation. The truth is, cloud hyperscalers and SaaS startups have spent years convincing your manager that their product can be deployed in seconds and will run reliably forever. But you know that isn’t the truth. It takes just as much effort to wire up the intricacies of your IdP to that platform’s “email is UPN, right?” SSO implementation. Clicking sign in with (insert IDP here) on the login page is one thing. Making it so a user, even if it’s just yourself, never sees a login page again - that’s doing cloud right.
I like to think of it this way. Cloud providers gave businesses that were already operating at hyperscale - uh - scale, the ability to offload some of their more repetitive work and plug into a system that was operated just as well. You most likely aren’t that, and your homelab certainly isn’t. You are probably one of the many that just trusts the invalid cert on your vCenter and iDRACs. What cloud gives users like you is the ability to do more than you could before. You have the chance to implement HA everywhere, not because you need to provide a service to thousands of users, but because you can, and you can be proud of it.
Still not convinced?
I promise I’m not a Microsoft shill either. Here’s a list of awesome services that have shaped my homelab journey that I also think are really cool:
- Cloudflare - for domains, zero trust networking, VPNs, internet filtering, and a growing developer platform
- GitHub - for source control, CI/CD, and a vast ecosystem of developer tools and integrations
- Tailscale - I used it before I moved to Cloudflare One
- Grafana Cloud - for monitoring, observability, and visualizing metrics from your homelab and cloud services
- Terraform Cloud - for learning infrastructure as code with a hands-on, rich visual interface
- Qualys - for vulnerability management, compliance, and security monitoring
- AWS - it’s the biggest cloud provider like it or not
- Google Cloud - for exploring another major cloud provider and its accompanying identity platform
Pick your interest, and get started. The hyper-focus on compute efficiency brought on by cloud providers’ by-the-minute pricing models has given us access to a plethora of cheap SaaS and serverless cloud computing resources. SaaS companies offer free tiers to get companies locked in before procurement or sometimes IT gets involved. There’s easily multiple years of late nights to be had without spending a single dollar on aging hardware. And on the IaaS/PaaS side, the free tier products are the same ones you’ll be wanting to use in production on the job anyway, because guess what - your workplace may have a bigger wallet than you do, but they still want to control costs.
What are you still reading this for? Go and start building your not-at-home homelab!