A homelab is a skill booster

In her article “What’s the biggest unsolved problem within Site Reliability Engineering?”, Paige Cruz identifies a critical challenge facing our industry: how do we pass the hard-won knowledge of veteran system administrators down to a new generation that has never worked outside cloud infrastructure?

Cruz makes a compelling case that this knowledge transfer gap represents SRE’s biggest unsolved problem. However, I take issue with one of her conclusions. She argues that “It’s also not acceptable or sustainable or accessible in my opinion to continue to expect people set up home-labs and experiment themselves. We don’t ask veterinarians to practice surgery in their free time at home and I don’t think we should expect that from future SRE.”

I respectfully disagree. A home lab represents the best investment a future SRE can make to secure their career growth.

The home lab advantage

The veterinarian comparison doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Veterinarians need live animals, surgical equipment, and sterile environments – resources that are neither practical nor ethical to maintain at home. Particle physicists need billion-dollar accelerators. But what does a sysadmin or SRE need to experiment with infrastructure? A few decommissioned Lenovo ThinkCentre boxes and a network switch.

The barrier to entry is remarkably low, and the learning potential is enormous.

Scientific research consistently shows that skill development requires more than passive consumption of learning materials. Growing expertise demands practical exploration – running into problems, analyzing failures, and working through solutions. A home lab provides exactly this environment, free from the constraints and pressures of production systems.

You don’t need a data centre in your basement. One or a few small networked PCs will serve you well. These machines consume minimal power and don’t need to run around the clock. Fire them up when you want to experiment with a new service mesh, test disaster recovery procedures, or break something just to see what happens.

For those who can’t or don’t want to maintain physical hardware, alternatives exist. “Pubmox” – the shared Proxmox Virtual Environment I maintain for members of “The Server Room” – offers free access to virtual infrastructure for hands-on learning.

The learning laboratory

A home lab creates space for the kind of curiosity-driven exploration that builds deep technical intuition. When you’re troubleshooting a networking issue at 2 AM in your home lab, you’re not worried about affecting customers or violating change management policies. You can take risks, make mistakes, and learn from the consequences.

This environment encourages the experimental mindset that separates great SREs from those who merely follow runbooks. You learn to ask “what if” questions and then actually test your hypotheses.

Knowledge transfer requires community

While I advocate strongly for home labs as skill boosters, they’re not the complete answer to Cruz’s original question about knowledge preservation. The solution to transferring veteran sysadmin wisdom doesn’t lie in solitary exploration – it requires collaborative knowledge transfer.

Home labs excel at building technical skills, but they can’t replace the mentorship and context that comes from working alongside experienced practitioners. The real magic happens when hands-on experimentation combines with guided learning from those who’ve solved these problems before.

This is why I’m launching “Basic Linux System Administration” – an instructor-led course backed by “The Server Room” community. Participants get free access to Pubmox, allowing them to practice what they learn while benefiting from my decades of system administration experience.

It’s the best of both worlds: the freedom to experiment and break things, combined with the guidance to understand why systems fail and how to make them more reliable.

A home lab won’t solve SRE’s knowledge transfer problem on its own. But for individual practitioners looking to deepen their skills and advance their careers, it remains an invaluable investment. The combination of practical experimentation and collaborative learning creates the foundation for the next generation of systems experts our industry desperately needs.