I was born before ADSL existed. Not before the internet - I'm not that old - but before it became something you lived in. The internet of my childhood was a thing you did on purpose, like going to the library, except the library was in the living room and made a sound... You've got to hear it to understand.

The first computer I remember wasn't mine. It was the family's, which meant it was mine only in the sense that I was the one who kept touching it. The hard disk was small enough that installing anything felt like a negotiation. Delete a game to make room for a new one. Copy your save files to a floppy first, because you knew - everyone knew - that the reinstall would go wrong and you'd need to roll back. We kept our lives on 1.44 megabytes, and I don't remember it being painful. I remember it being exact. You counted. You chose. Nothing was abstract yet.

Then the CDs arrived, and with them the smell. You know the one. That faint plastic-and-ink smell when you crack a shrink-wrapped box, the manual still stiff, the disc seated in its little foam ring. An operating system used to arrive as an object. You held the whole thing in one hand. Windows 98 was roughly the weight of a sandwich. I unboxed my first OS like it was a gift, because to me it was - someone had decided what computing was, printed that decision on 200 pages, and handed it to me at a shop.

I didn't know it then, but that's the era I keep returning to when people ask why I run my own servers. Everything since has been a slow removal of edges. The disk became a download, the download became a stream, the stream became something that's just there, on someone else's machine, in a country you'll never visit, under a company you've only ever seen as a logo on a billing page. Convenient. Extremely convenient. I won't pretend I didn't enjoy every step of it.

But the floppy era taught me a lesson I've never unlearned: I like knowing where things are.

The first machine that felt like mine rather than the family's was nothing special. I've seen the spec sheet in my memory so many times that the actual numbers have worn away, and I've decided I prefer it that way. What matters is that it was the first one where the question wasn't "what can this computer do?" but "what can I make this computer do?" That question has cost me an enormous amount of money, sleep, and kitchen table space, and I regret none of it.

So here's where this blog is going, and why the name is a small joke I'll explain later.

Most of what I do for a living is cloud. Real cloud, big cloud, the kind with regions and availability zones and a support plan. I'm not here to tell you the cloud is bad - that would be a strange thing for someone whose paycheck depends on it, and also it would be untrue. The cloud is astonishing. I like the cloud.

But at home, on hardware I can touch, I run Kubernetes. Not on a Raspberry Pi cluster arranged on a shelf for the photo, though I've done that too, and the photo looked great. I mean actual metal. Machines with fans you can hear, disks you can pull, a rack that hums in a corner of the house and draws real watts off a real circuit that I wired. And the honest pitch is not "it's better." The honest pitch is this:

I like knowing where things are. Bare metal is where things are.

When my homelab works, I know exactly which machine, which disk, which cable, which rule in which firewall. When it breaks - and it breaks, regularly, at inconvenient hours - I know exactly which machine, which disk, which cable, which rule. There is no dashboard standing between me and the failure. The failure is physical. I can put my hand on it. Some people would call that a disadvantage. I call it the closest thing to the floppy-disk era that exists in 2026.

The catch, and I will never downplay this on this blog: it costs time. An enormous amount of time. Kubernetes on bare metal is a hobby the way a dog is a hobby - it's fine when you're there, and it knows exactly when you're not. The cloud gives you weekends. The rack does not. If you're reading this deciding which side to pick: the cloud is probably right for you, and I say that without condescension, because for years I picked the cloud too, and it was the right call, and I still make it every day at work.

This blog is about the other side of the ledger. The part you can't bill.